She regarded him and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm.

The soldier personally, she was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence: a sort of schoolboy when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not a member of our broader world.

Without dismissing any of these views she found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the country.

If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was one whom it would be grievous to lose.

He had fallen for the country; and there was a moving story of how he had fallen.