



Produced by Suzanne Shell, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
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    FROM SCHOOL TO BATTLE-FIELD


    [Illustration: "Come down aff the top o' dthat harrse!"]


    FROM SCHOOL TO BATTLE-FIELD

    A STORY OF THE WAR DAYS

    BY CAPTAIN CHARLES KING, U.S.A. AUTHOR OF "TROOPER ROSS," ETC.


    ILLUSTRATED BY VIOLET OAKLEY AND CHARLES H. STEPHENS


    PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1899


    COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.




    ILLUSTRATIONS


    "COME DOWN AFF THE TOP O' DTHAT HARRSE!"

    ALMOST SENSELESS, TILL SHORTY STROVE TO LIFT HIS BLEEDING HEAD UPON
      HIS KNEE

    "I COULDN'T STAND IT. I HAD TO GO"

    SHE WAS PERMITTED TO READ AND TO WEEP OVER SNIPE'S PATHETIC LETTER

    FIRST CAPTURE OF THE ADVANCING ARMS OF THE UNION

    "WHERE'D YOU GET THAT WATCH?"




FROM SCHOOL TO BATTLE-FIELD.




CHAPTER I.


"If there's anything I hate more than a rainy Saturday, call me a
tadpole!" said the taller of two boys who, with their chins on their
arms and their arms on the top of the window-sash, were gazing gloomily
out over a dripping world. It was the second day of an east wind, and
every boy on Manhattan Island knows what an east wind brings to New York
City, or used to in days before the war, and this was one of them.

"And our nine could have lammed that Murray Hill crowd a dozen to
nothing!" moaned the shorter, with disgust in every tone. "Next Saturday
the 'Actives' have that ground, and there'll be no decent place to
play--unless we can trap them over to Hoboken. What shall we do,
anyhow?"

The taller boy, a curly-headed, dark-eyed fellow of sixteen, whose long
legs had led to his school name of Snipe, turned from the contemplation
of an endless vista of roofs, chimneys, skylights, clothes-lines, all
swimming in an atmosphere of mist, smoke, and rain, and glanced back at
the book-laden table.

"There's that Virgil," he began, tentatively.

"Oh, Virgil be blowed!" broke in the other on the instant. "It's bad
enough to have to work week-days. I mean what can we do for--fun?" and
the blue eyes of the youngster looked up into the brown of his taller
chum.

"That's all very well for you, Shorty," said Snipe. "Latin comes easy to
you, but it don't to me. You've got a sure thing on exam., I haven't,
and the pater's been rowing me every week over those blasted reports."

"Well-l, I'm as bad off in algebra or Greek, for that matter. 'Pop' told
me last week I ought to be ashamed of myself," was the junior's answer.

And, lest it be supposed that by "Pop" he referred to the author of his
being, and thereby deserves the disapproval of every right-minded reader
at the start, let it be explained here and now that "Pop" was the
head--the "rector"--of a school famous in the ante-bellum days of
Gotham; famous indeed as was its famous head, and though they called him
nicknames, the boys worshipped him. Older boys, passed on into the cap
and gown of Columbia (items of scholastic attire sported only, however,
at examinations and the semi-annual speech-making), referred to the
revered professor of the Greek language and literature as "Bull," and
were no less fond of him, nor did they hold him less in reverence. Where
are they now, I wonder?--those numerous works bound in calf, embellished
on the back with red leather bands on which were stamped in gold ----'s
Virgil, ----'s Horace, ----'s Sallust, ----'s Homer? Book after book had
he, grammars of both tongues, prosodies likewise, Roman and Greek
antiquities, to say nothing of the huge classical dictionary. One could
cover a long shelf in one's student library without drawing upon the
works of any other authority, and here in this dark little room, on the
topmost floor of a brownstone house in Fourteenth Street, a school-boy
table was laden at its back with at least eight of Pop's ponderous tomes
to the exclusion of other classics.

But on the shelf above were books by no means so scholarly and far more
worn. There they stood in goodly array, Mayne Reid's "Boy Hunters,"
"Scalp Hunters," "The Desert Home," "The White Chief," flanked by a
dusty "Sanford and Merton" that appeared to hold aloof from its
associates. There, dingy with wear though far newer, was Thomas Hughes's
inimitable "Tom Brown's School-Days at Rugby." There was what was then
his latest, "The Scouring of the White Horse," which, somehow, retained
the freshness of the shop. There were a few volumes of Dickens, and
Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. There on the wall were some vivid battle
pictures, cut from the _London Illustrated News_,--the Scots Grays in
the melee with the Russian cavalry at Balaklava; the Guards, in their
tall bearskins and spike-tail coats, breasting the <DW72>s of the Alma.
There hung a battered set of boxing-gloves, and on the hooks above them
a little brown rifle, muzzle-loading, of course. The white-covered bed
stood against the wall on the east side of the twelve-by-eight
apartment, its head to the north. At its foot were some objects at which
school-boys of to-day would stare in wonderment; a pair of heavy boots
stood on the floor, with a pair of trousers so adjusted to them that, in
putting on the boots, one was already half-way into the trousers, and
had only to pull them up and tightly belt them at the