"
"Ah, who wouldn't?" exclaims another; "to starve, roast, and freeze by
turns for one's country, requires more patriotism by far than to march up
to the cannon's mouth, or charge up hill under a galling fire of
musketry."
"True indeed, Jones," returns a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man, with
face so gaunt and haggard with famine that his own mother would scarcely
have recognized him, and distinguished from the rest by a ball and chain
attached to wrist and ankle; "and yet we bear it for her sake and for
Freedom's. Who of us regrets that we did not stay at home in inglorious
ease, and leave our grand old ship of state to founder and go to pieces
amid the rocks of secession?"
"None of us, Allison! No, no! the Union forever!" returned several voices
in chorus.
"Hark!"--as the sharp crack of a rifle was heard, and a prisoner who, half
crazed with suffering, had, in staggering about, approached too near the
fatal line and laid a hand upon it, fell dead--"another patriot soul has
gone to its account, and another rebel earned a thirty days' furlough."
The dark eyes of the speaker flashed with indignation.
"Poor fellows, they don't know that it is to preserve _their_ liberties we
fight, starve, and die; to save them from the despotism their ambitious
and unscrupulous leaders desire to establish over them," remarked Harold
Allison; "how grossly the masses of the Southern people have been deceived
by a few hot-headed politicians, bent upon obtaining power for themselves
at whatever cost.
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