"
"Professor Nicolovius," said Queed, with a slow smile, "where on earth
do you exhume your ideas of Southern history?"
"Observation, my dear boy! God bless us, haven't I had three years of
this city to use my eyes and ears in? And I had a peculiar training in
my youth," he added, retrospectively, "to fit me to see straight and
generalize accurately."
... Couldn't the man see that no persecuted Irishman ever talked in such
a way since the world began? If he had a part to play, why in the name
of common sense couldn't he play it respectably?
Queed got up, and began strolling about the floor. In his mind was what
Sharlee Weyland had said to him two hours before: "All the bitterness
nowadays comes from the non-combatants, the camp-followers, the sutlers,
and the cowards." Under which of these heads did his friend, the old
professor, fall?... Why had he ever thought of Nicolovius as, perhaps, a
broken Union officer? A broken Union officer would feel bitter, if at
all, against the Union. A man who felt so bitter against the South--
A resolution was rapidly hardening in the young man's mind.
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