things, the leading topic of conversation being the soldiers of the
two regiments that were stationed in our town. We saw a good
deal of these soldiers, and we could tell their officers,
commissioned or non-commissioned, by the number of stars or
bands on their shoulder-straps. Also, we knew the names of their
generals, colonels, and some of their majors or captains. The more
important manoeuvers took place a great distance from Abner's
Court, but that did not matter. If they occurred on a Saturday,
when we were free from school--and, as good luck would have it,
they usually did--many of us, myself invariably included, would go
to see them. The blare of trumpets, the beat of drums, the playing
of the band, the rhythmic clatter of thousands of feet, the glint or
rows and rows of bayonets, the red or the blue of the uniforms, the
commanding officer on his mount, the spirited singing of the men
marching back to barracks--all this would literally hold me
spellbound

That we often played soldiers goes without saying, but we played
"hares" more often, a game in which the counting was done by
means of senseless words like the American "Eeny, meeny, miny,
moe." Sometimes we would play war, with the names of the
belligerents borrowed from the Old Testament, and once in a
while we would have a real "war" with the boys of the next street

I was accounted one of the strong fellows among the boys of
Abner's Court as well as one of the conspicuous figures among
them. Compactly built, broad-shouldered, with a small, firm
mouth like my mother's, a well-formed nose and large, dark eyes,
I was not a homely boy by any means, nor one devoid of a certain
kind of magnetism