Harry had never before seen his general in so mellow a vein.

Perhaps it was the last blaze of the home-loving spirit, before entering into that storm of battle which henceforth was to be his without a break.
The general, under urging, told of his life as an orphan boy in his uncle's rough home in the Virginia wilderness, how he had been seized once by the wanderlust, then so strong in nearly all Americans, and how he and his brother had gone all the way down the Ohio to the Mississippi, where they had camped on a little swampy island, earning their living by cutting wood for the steamers on the two rivers.
"How old were you two then, General ?" asked Dr.Graham.
"The older of us was only twelve.

But in those rough days boys matured fast and became self-reliant at a very early age.

We did not run away.
There wasn't much opposition to our going.

Our uncle was sure that we'd come back alive, and though we arrived again in Virginia, five or six hundred miles from our island in the river, all rags and filled with fever, we were not regarded as prodigal sons.