[155] one who may be feverish and thirsty; the man who is like a father as well as a captain of his soldiers. He is the man who administered that stern rebuke the other day to the upstart West-Point cadet, sent to drill the company. The first day, the cadet interlarded the orders with oaths,—his commands with curses. The men complained to their captain. “I'll stop that to-morrow,” says he. The next day's drill begins, and the cadet begins to swear at the soldiers. “Please not swear at my men, sir,” says the captain. “What do you know about the drill?” says the cadet; “and what can you do about my swearing?” “Sir,” says the captain sternly, “I know this, and you ought to know it,—swearing is forbidden by the army regulation; and, if you continue to break the rule, I'll order my men to march off the ground, and they'll obey me, and leave you to swear alone.” The cadet took the rebuke, and swore no more at that company. There are many officers of this stamp; and then there is among the soldiers enough of the old Puritan leaven to lighten the lump.‘The stalwart man, every inch of whose six feet is of soldier stamp,’ was undoubtedly Captain Prescott, who commanded the Concord company in the Fifth Regiment, as the story is told of him in nearly the same words by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his address, delivered a few months ago on the occasion of the dedication of the soldiers' monument, erected in Concord in honor of the soldiers of that town who fell in the war. On that monument is the name of George L. Prescott, who, as colonel of the Massachusetts Thirty-second Regiment, fell in front of Petersburg, mortally wounded, on the 18th of June, 1864, while leading his men in a charge upon the enemy, and who died on the field. A brave and generous gentleman! Dr. Howe's report is too long to quote entire. It contains many wise suggestions in regard to cleanliness and cooking rations, and concludes with this pithy sentence: ‘If a tithe of the science, skill, and care which are so liberally given to improving all the means of killing the soldiers of other armies were devoted to the means of keeping our own soldiers in health, the present fearful mortality of war would be greatly lessened.’ We have stated in the preceding chapter, that, when General Butler landed with the Eighth Regiment at Annapolis, a rumor reached him that the slaves in that vicinity were on the eve of
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