Page:Books and men.djvu/211

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THE CAVALIER.
201

butcher," one critic angrily calls the sober little volume, forgetting in his heat that the term "hired butcher," though most scathing in sound, is equally applicable to any soldier, from the highest to the lowest, who is paid by his government to kill his fellow-men. War is a rough trade, and if we choose to call names, it is as easy any time to say "butcher" as "hero." Stronger words have not been lacking to vilify Dundee, and many of these choice anathemas belong, one fears, to Luther's catalogue of "downright, infamous, scandalous lies." Their freshness, however, is as amazing as their ubiquity, and they confront us every now and then in the most forlorn nooks and crannies of literature. Not very long ago I was shut up for half an hour in a boarding-house parlor, in company with a solitary little book entitled Scheyichbi and the Strand, or Early Days along the Delaware. Its name proved to be the only really attractive thing about it, and I was speculating drearily as to whether Charles Lamb himself could have extracted any amusement from its pages, when suddenly my eye lighted on a sentence that read like an old familiar friend: "The cru-