Chapter 11 - Page 2

dancing with fellows like myself, and the roses were everywhere, and the music rose and fell like the song of angels, and I was so happy and--I awoke to find myself here on a hillside with a ragged army that's been marching and fighting for days and weeks, and which, for all I know, will keep it up for years and years longer."

"I've a piece of advice for you, Arthur," said Langdon.

"What is it?"

"Quit dreaming. It's a bad habit, especially when you're in war. The dream is sure to be better than the real thing. You won't be dancing again in Charleston for a long time, nor will I. All those beautiful girls you were dreaming about but couldn't name will be without partners until we're a lot older than we are now."

Langdon spoke with a seriousness very uncommon in him, and lay back again on the ground, where he began to chew a grass stem meditatively.

"Go back to sleep, boys, you'll need it," said Harry lightly. "Our next march is to be a thousand miles, and we're to have a battle at every milestone."

"You mean that as a joke, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it came true," said Langdon, as he closed his eyes again.

Harry went on and found the two colonels sitting in the shadow of a stone fence. One of them had his arm in a sling, but he assured Harry the wound was slight. They gave him a glad and paternal welcome.

"In the kind of campaign we're waging," said Colonel Leonidas Talbot, "I assume that anybody is dead until I see him alive. Am I not right, eh, Hector?"

"Assuredly you're right, Leonidas," replied Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire. "Our young men don't get frightened because they don't have time to think about it. Before we can get excited over the battle in which we are engaged we've begun the next one. It is also a matter of personal pride to me that one of the best bodies of troops in the service of General Jackson is of French descent like myself."

"The Acadians, colonel," said Harry. "Grand troops they are."

"It is the French fighting blood," said Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire, with a little trace of the grandiloquent in his tone. "Slurs have been cast at the race from which I sprang since the rout and flight at Waterloo, but how undeserved they are! The French have burned more gunpowder and have won more great battles without the help of allies than any other nation in Europe. And their descendants in North America have shown their valor all the way from Quebec to New Orleans, although we are widely separated now, and scarcely know the speech of one another."

"It's true, Hector," said Colonel Leonidas Talbot. "I think I've heard you say as much before, but it will bear repeating. Do you think, Hector, that you happen to have about you