"Very pretty," said the colonel, "very pretty, indeed. Quite up to _our_ standard, eh, Jack? Guard looks small, though,--doesn't it?--to one who's used to seeing twenty-four files paraded." The colonel and I had got leave for a couple of weeks to run down to Old Point to see the heavy gun practice, and now we stood watching the new guard as it marched away to relieve the old details.
Yes, it _was_ pretty, all of it,--very pretty indeed,--and I felt repaid for the early breakfast we had taken in order to get over to the fort in time for the ceremony. The surroundings made a fitting frame for the picture: before us lay the broad, green floor of the level parade, its carpet of short-cropped turf still glistening with the morning dew; the angular lines of the great, ungainly barracks somehow looked less harsh in the warm sunshine; and the officers' quarters, half hidden beneath the scrubby oaks and overhanging willows, looked cosey and comfortable--and almost too homelike for such a place.
While the gray, sod-capped walls of the old fort still were ringing with the quickstep played by the four smart trumpeters who led the guard in its march, we turned and left the parade, loitering for a moment at the place where the old guns--relics of Yorktown, Saratoga, and many another by-gone siege and battle--lie sullen and dumb, while the green mould of long years gathers ever more thickly upon cascabel, chase, and trunnion. "Back numbers," said the colonel, half to himself, as he stooped to read the inscription deeply graven in the metal of an old field-piece, "back numbers, all of them. 'Captured at Yorktown'--and that was more than a hundred years ago! Well, those who won and those who lost are under ground now, and the old gun's dead, too. It has said its last word."
We sauntered away, through the echoing archway, and across the drawbridge which spans the green and quiet water of the wide ditch; and as we slowly walked past the water battery, with its long row of grim, black Rodmans frowning out upon the bay--each in its vaulted casemate--like so many kennelled watch-dogs, the colonel broke the silence with, "Do you know, Jack, I don't care particularly about watching the firing to-day? The pounding we got yesterday was infernal. I hope this country can steer clear of war until we've perfected the pneumatic gun."