een-faced, in the shoddy uniform of a private. His conversation was at
once that of a patriot and a gentleman; and it did not require many
moments of unavoidable listening for the young girl to discover that he
was well educated. Further conversation between himself and other
passengers who seemed to know and respect him, showed that he had
abandoned his studies in a leading institution, to answer the call of
the country--that mathematics and military science had formed a
considerable part of his studies--that he had had some hopes, when he
enlisted, of obtaining the grade of a subaltern officer, when he should
succeed in procuring sufficient enlistments--that by his personal
efforts and fervid eloquence he had already succeeded in enlisting more
than fifty men for the regiment with which he was connected, and was
then on his way to another section of the county to make further efforts
in the same direction--and that he was still a "full private," with a
certainty of rising no higher, because he had neither money nor
political influence to put him forward. So that this young patriot and
soldier, who showed the power and energy of his nature in every glance
of his eye and every word he spoke, was to be kept in the lowest
position known to the service, and commanded by men who had never heard
of a book on military science or tactics, a week before, but who could
buy commissions or command a certain number of votes at a town-meeting!
Josephine Harris had studied the current history of the time, enough to
know and recognize the picture set before her, and to say, silently and
between her set teeth:

"Oh, I wish I was only a man, to start out with a horsewhip and lash
these incapables until they howled!"

Six o'clock, and the stage went rumbling and swaying into the little
village of West Falls, which it is hoped that no matter-of-fact reader
will attempt to find on the map of Oneida, albeit it has a veritable
existence there under another name. It was a cozy little spot, nestled
down into the valley of a small stream, half creek and half river, that
formed a cataract in the neighborhood and gave it the name. Factories
clustered along the stream, making the idle water labor for the benefit
of man, and within them whirred the spindle of the cotton or wool
spinner and clanked the hammer of the worker in iron and steel. The
village itself lay partly in the valley, along the east margin of the
stream, and partly climbing the sl