tercourse with volunteer
officers. Politeness with him, assumed the airs and grimaces of a French
dancing-master, which personage he was not unfrequently and not inaptly
said to resemble. Displeasure he would manifest by the oddest of
gestures and volleys of the latest oaths, uttered in a nervous, half
stuttering manner. Socially, his extensive educational acquirements made
him a pleasant companion, and with a friend it was said he would drink
as deep and long as any man in the Army of the Potomac. Once crossed,
however, his malignity would be manifested by the most intolerable and
petty persecution.

"He has no judgment," said a Field-Officer of a Regiment of his command;
a remark which, by the way, was a good summary of his character.

"Why?" replied the officer to whom he was speaking.

"I was out on picket duty," rejoined the other, "yesterday. We had an
unnecessarily heavy Reserve, and one half of the men in it were allowed
to rest without their belts and boxes. The General in the afternoon paid
us a visit, and seeing this found fault, that the men were not kept
equipped; observing at the same time that they could rest equally well
with their cartridge boxes on; that when he was a Cadet at West Point he
had ascertained by actual practice that it could be done."

"Do you recollect, General," I remarked, "whether you had forty rounds
of ball cartridge in your box then?"

"He said he did not know that that made any difference."

"Now considering that the fact of the boxes being filled makes all the
difference, I say," continued the officer, "that the man who makes a
remark such a the General made, is devoid of judgment."

But he was connected both by ties of friendship and consanguinity with
the hitherto Commander of the Army of the Potomac. His Adjutant-General
was related to the same personage. The position of the latter, for which
he was totally unfitted by his habits, was perhaps a condition precedent
to the appointment of the General of Division.

The fifth of November, a day destined to become celebrated hereafter in
American as in English history, dawned not less inauspiciously upon the
Head-quarters of the Corps. They too could not appreciate the dry humor
of the order that commanded Little Mac to report at Trenton. They
thought alone of the unwelcome reality--that it was but an American way
of sending him to Coventry. The Commander of the Corps had been a great
favorite at the Head-quarters of the arm