ter in this
city--the rough fisherman from Cape Cod--the lumberman from the forests
of Maine--and the long, gangling squirrel-hunters from the wilds of
Wisconsin,--all meet together to fight for the same cause."

"True," said Harding--"true. And I suppose that fanaticism _does_ fight
well. It has no fear of death, and very little of consequences. How much
difference was there, I wonder, between Ali at the head of his Moslem
horde, fresh from the teachings of Mohammed himself, and fully impressed
with the belief that if he died he should go at once to the company of
the Houris in Paradise,--and Cromwell--or Old John Brown--in a
corresponding madness of supposed Christianity? Not much, eh?"

"Not much--none at all!" replied Leslie. "But see how long this one
regiment has been in filing past. Only one regiment--not much more than
a thousand men, and yet the street seems full of the glisten of their
bayonets for half-a-mile. We have grown used to handling the phrases
'thirty thousand,' 'fifty thousand,' 'one hundred thousand,' or even 'a
quarter of a million' of men, just as glibly as we speak of one, two or
ten millions of money; and yet we realize very little of the force of
those numbers. Fifty thousand men are considered to be no army--nothing
more than a skirmishing party, now-a-days; and yet to form it, forty or
fifty such bodies of men as that which has just passed us must be
included. Is it any wonder--after studying a thousand men in this
manner--that while we have many generals capable of managing five or ten
thousand, very few can command fifty thousand without making a mess of
it, and a hundred thousand succeeds in crazing almost every one of our
commanders?"

"Wonder? No, I should think not," said Harding, laughing. "I have puzzle
enough, sometimes, with even that number of _figures_, and I should make
a bad muddle of handling that quantity of men. But, by the way, did you
ever read that singular novel, 'Border War,' by a South-western writer,
Jones, published several years ago?"

"I have skimmed it--never read it," said Leslie. "Remarkable book, I
should say, to be read over now-a-days, when the event then handled as
romance has become reality!"

"The numbers of his opposing forces, as compared with the actual armies
of the present day, are the great point of interest," said Harding. "He
makes terrible blunders in guessing at the great battle-ground of the
war, as he lays the principal battles in Upper Ma