And this war (we may say so much in
its favor) has been the means of discovering that important secret to
not a few.
We saw at Willard's many who had thus found out for themselves, that,
when Nature gives a young man no other utilizable faculty, she must be
understood as intending him for a soldier. The bulk of the army had
moved out of Washington before we reached the city; yet it seemed to
me that at least two-thirds of the guests and idlers at the hotel wore
one or another token of the military profession. Many of them, no
doubt, were self-commissioned officers, and had put on the buttons and
the shoulder-straps, and booted themselves to the knees, merely
because captain, in these days, is so good a travelling-name. The
majority, however, had been duly appointed by the President, but might
be none the better warriors for that. It was pleasant, occasionally,
to distinguish a grizzly veteran among this crowd of carpet-knights,
--the trained soldier of a lifetime, long ago from West Point,
who had spent his prime upon the frontier, and very likely could
show an Indian bullet-mark on his breast,--if such decorations, won in
an obscure warfare, were worth the showing now.
The question often occurred to me,--and, to say the truth, it added an
indefinable piquancy to the scene,--what proportion of all these
people, whether soldiers or civilians, were true at heart to the Union,
and what part were tainted, more or less, with treasonable sympathies
and wishes, even if such had never blossomed into purpose.
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