Soldiers' record, 1870-02-19

              f ^
Ol!)M FLAa, ONE LAND, ONE HEART, ONE HAWD, ONE NATION, EVERMORE!
YOL. II. HARTEORD, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1870. NO. 33.
ioiirs at iomc.
THE TWO FLAGS.
AX INC[DKNT OF TUB WAR IN CUHA.
Prono from tlio black-browed More—tlio castlc-crcsted
crag— , ,
Drooped in the drowsy uoontido, the red and yel-
And illl otwh e llsaege,t liiug city tlio sun Avith fiery glare,
Flashed ou a sea of faces—a thousand bayonets
bare.
Soldiers -with siilleu faces—a doomed man trem-bled
n i g h -
While a jiiotley throng from every side i)oured
forth to see liim die ;
And all the mighty multitude beheld with bated
breath.
The scene of coming slaughter—the many throat-ed
death.
But by the palid prisoner, bare headed and stern
browed
Strode forth two valiant consuls before the surg-ing
crowd;
One waved Columbia's banner, and one the
Union Jack,
•\Vhile all were Jilled with wontler and warned the
bravo men back.
But step by step together, before those armed
bands,
Paced the proud consuls, holding the ensigns in
tlieir hands;
"Present!" Tiio three stood silent, one momejit
lace to face—
The consuls calm and steady, and the prisoner in
his place.
A sudden Hash of crimson, of red, and Avhite and
blue—
The trembling captive cowered between the
dauntless two ;
The three stood drajjcd together beneath the ban-ners'
fold—
The proud twin Hags of Freedom—of the New
World and the Old.
dents hunt in couples and the like-
Then turning steru and haughty npon the order-ed
line :
"By these broud flags I claim him and keep him,
lie is mine!
Thus England and Columbia stretch arms across
the seas
To shield hiin. Strike the prisoner : you strike
through us and these !"
Thus outspake he of England. Like lions brought
to bay,
The twain Avith eyes defiant, looked round that
stern array.
There fell a solemn silence the rifle barrels shone;
Still at the dooom.smen's shoulders ; men shud-dered
and looked on.
Till in clear voice, crossing the bullets' tlu'eaten-ed
track.
Rang out the sudden mandate to march the pris-oner
back;
And as the shining escort fell back and faced
about,
From all the crowded piazza went up one mighty
shout.
A mighty storm of vivas, that rent the sultry
skies,
Greeted the gallant consuls—the deed of liigli
emprise.
Still louder, ever louder, went up that vast ac-claim,
From all the mighty jdazza bathed in its noon-day
llame.
Onward to future ages, far down tlio teeming
years,
That sea of upturned faces sends forth its storm
of cheers:
Long shall the deed bo honored, and proudly
handed down,
To crown the victor consuls with Fame's endur-ing
crown!
ilail to the hero consuls,' Hail to the noble
twain
Who diircd for (ruth and duty tlio bullets deadly
rain!
How strong to face the mighty—how great to
guard the weak—
Are these, the gre-ut twin nations to whom the
helpless seek i
Still shall our arms i^rotecting be stretched across
the sea—
Still Kliall the tyrants fear us who set th(;ir cap-tives
free.
Wrapiied in a mighty mantle from hatred's cruel
scars—
The blood red Cross of England, Columbia's
Stripes and Stars!
EDWAHD KKNAUI>.
From (he February numler of LipinncoWa Magazine.
From Putnam's Magazine.
THAWED OUT.
I MIGHT have known something queer
was going to happen when the Simple Su-f^
aJi went down.
Daino Fortune, or the equally unamen-able
female yclept Evolution, who has
usurped her place in nineteenth century
mythology, always makes two bites at a
cherry when she considers it worth her
while to taste it at all—as witness the old
proverbs : "It never rains but it poui-s
''Mislbrtunes never come singly j" "Acci-
"What's up ?
and I might havc Torefieen that more would
come of it than a simple shipwreck, if I j the very
had not been too ardently engaged in res- last, we
cuing myself from the rfeim of ray be-longings,
to speculate upon the law of se-quences.
And, even in the light of antiquity, con-densed
into proverbs and polarized by per-sonal
experience, I feel inclined to excuse
myself.
Tossing up and down in an open boat
on the stormy waves of the North Pacific,
and watching the tea-chests and spice-bales
into which, in an evil liour, one has
metamorphosed one's precious eagles and
moidores, bob nway into Ultima Thule,
or wherever it is all the lose things go to
—(a shrewd old tar, of my acqunintance,
has a theory which ho maintains in the
face of all geography, and with consider-able
show of reason, too, that there is, in
some unexplored, unexplorable region,
such a hole as Syms dreamed of, and that
it is crammed and jammed full of them)—
is not a situation eminently conducive to
the exercise of philosophy, Spencerian or
otherwise. And when to these discour-aging
circumstances are added a sick
Irishman as sole cnmpagnon du voyage,
and a half empty cigar-case and pocket-flask
of brandy as sole provision for Avhat
bids fair to be a lengthy cruise, I think
one may hold oneself fairly justified in
thinking and acting, as the saying is, from
hand to mouth : and denouucing Dame
Fortune, or the other woman, for the rum
old jade she looks to be.
It was a very uncomfortable pickle to
be in, I assure you ; and being in it was
all owing, under Dame Fortune, or the
other woman, to the American-—I beg
pardon—the GREAT xVmerican Tea Com-pany.
I had fallen heir to a fortune, or, at
least, the rudiments of one—;just that
snug little sura which bloated capitalists
are always likening to the snowball which,
skilfully turned over, gathers and grows
into a mountain.
Looking around for a comfortable, well-powdered,
inclined plane down which to
roll it, I stumbled upon one of the adver-tisements
of thot immortal company.
Good reader, did yon ever peruse one ?
If you h 've not, try it. You'll find itevon
yet, alone with Tagliabue's Efl'eivescent
iSeltzer Aperient, and the Gingham Elec-tro-
plate (no charge for these notices) np-on
the cover of your favorite magazine
or in the columns of your daily paper.
Try i t ; and I'll guarantee, unless you
are a boarding-house keeper, with a sharp
eye to the economies, it will have the
same ell'ect upon yon that it had upon me.
Yon will immediately make a rough guess
at the sum-total of those "czV'^ profits,"
and paint upon the fumes of your meer-schaum
a picture in gold-foil, regular pre-
Ilaphaelite style, of yourself as banker,
owner, shipper, importer, speculator,
dealer, &c., all in one.
home-voyage, when, one afternoon, just at
the middle of a choice Havana, and at
(lenoimnent of Miss Braddon's
were struck by—something—I
don't know to this hour whether it was a
simoom, or a cyclone, or a sirocco—I am
not a meteorologist, and I have been pre-vented,
by circumstances over which I
had no control, from comparing notes
with Simpson, ray skipper.
O'Shea, my comrade in the boat, inclines
to the opinion that it was a sirocco ; but
I have a vngue, spectral association of
that word with Don Padilla and the Three
Spaniards; which leads me to mistrust
O'Shea's geography. I'll tell you how it
ncted, and perhaos you can judge for your-self.
I was, as I said, lounging in my cabin
at the choicest puff of a cigar, and in the
very act of detecting and exposing JMiss
Braddon's murder'ng-thief-ot-a-bigamist
hero, when I heard a sudden, sharp call,
unmistakably,the captain's, "All hands on
deck!" V^ hat with the cigar and the nov-el,
my wits were rather in the abstract,
but I remember glancing out at the open
cabin-window, mentally exclaiming.
The sea's as smooth as a
duck-pond !" and then relapsing again.
Two minutes afterward a shadow like
midnight fell across my page, shrouding
the rascal in congenial darkness, and leav-ing
me to this hour in ignorance as to
whether he ever got his deserts.
My first thought was that the ship was
sinking, and the cabin already under wa
ter. Then I remembered the open win-dow,
and scrambled hastily to the deck.
If I were a Salvator Rosa, I should like
to paint you the scene which met my eye
I have a mental photograph of it which
no pen can do justice to—nor brush either,
for the matter. To leeward the sky was
soft and fair, and bright with che reflect-ed
hues of sunset, and the sea calm as a
summer lake ; to windward the one was
like ink and the other like buttermilk.
For one breathless instant we seemed to
hang between the two in motionless sus-pense
; the next, it was all niixec
er in a seething mass, with the Simple
Susan spinning round the midst, humming
like a gigantic top.
I heard a groaning crash of timbers
caught a momentary glimpse of Simpson's
while, despairing face ; felt, rather than
heard, through the din, his desperate or-der,
"To the boats !" and thought, God
knows how or why, of O'Shea, the Irish
sailor, helpless wiMi fever down below.
Poor fellow ! 1 found him sitting up in
his berth, drenched with the sea "which
was already spouting in, in bucketfuls,
and muttering his Aves and Paternos-ters
with frantic devotion. We got upoi
deck somehow ; but what happeiujd after-ward
I can't tell you, for 1 don't know
myself.
1 have a confused remembrance of
plunging about for an indefinite period,
with one arm I'onnd poor Patsey, amid a
And I'll engage, too, if you happen to surging mass of timbers, and bales, and
have, as i had, a snug little pile awaiting : boxes. I think Uie ship must have liter-investment,
and uo feminines lo cry you Iji'oken in pieces ; and how we came
nay, you'll charter a ship, as I did, and outofheralive,passed my comprehension,
hire a captain and crew, and go ont as However, we did ; and, what is more,
your own supercargo, and buy your tea ' so did Simj)son and the rest. They picked
at a bargain,—and here's wishing you bet- i each other up into the long-boat, and were
ter luck with your venture than I had' picked up again by a British vnerchant-with
mine. | man, and so got home, safe and sound.
Things wont on smoothly enough at j I've never seen any of them since ; for,
first, though—have yon observed, they al- when I got back to New York the other
ways do wlien one is getting into a. scrape? day, they had all shipped again for vari-
—I secured a splendid ship, and a capi- ' ous ports ; but I am told they searched
tal captain, and a creditable crew. We for us lorg and faithfully. I suppose we
made a good voyage out, bought a fine parted company in the night, and they
cargo of'teas at a bargain in Hong Kong, finally gave us u]) for lost, and told
filled up the chinks with spices at Manilla, O'Shea's mother some sort ofcock-and-and
set sail for home in the best health hull story about my heroism in sacrificing
and S p i r i t s , all hands round. ] myself to save her son, which put the poor
We were—somewheie—-I don't k n o w ^^^^ great expense in masses lor
precisely the latitude ard longitude ; and /"the two of us."
1 had just settled fairly to work boring i Meanwhile we had found ourselves at
my way through the package of cigars last under a clear, star-lit sky, clinging
and chest of novels 1 had reserved for the to a piece of the wreck ; and, as good luck
would have it, with the small-boat, half
full of water, floating near. I baled her
out with a pipkin which I managed to
catch, and got O'Shea in ; and so in tho
morning there we were, as I said, afloat
on tlie broad Pacific, with a half-pint of
brandy and a brace of wet cigars for our
breakfast«, watching my tea-chests hob a-way
towa: d some Pacific Ultima I'hule.
Three mortal days we floated there—
days which won't bear talking about. I
fed the brandy by thimblefuls to poor
O'Shea, and chewed awav the cigar.s my-self.
Upon the morning of the fourth dav^,
when I had begun to think a i^ood (leal
about the ancient mariner, and Patsey
had begun to call piteously upon St. Laza-rus,
a Russian whaler hove iu sight, and
was finally induced to reply to my frantic
pantomine, by sending out a boat to our
rescue.
Queer, isn't; it, w^hat creatures of cir-cumstances
we are ! Po'^'itivel}^ now,
that abominable stench of train-oil, with
which the whole vessel was reeking,
smelled fragrant as the perfumes of Araby;
and that off scouring of Babel—that char-ivair
of consonants demented which ser-ves
the Sclavonics in lieu of a language—
sounded sweet as the music of the spheres.
The Russian captain spoke no English,
or next to none ; but O'Shea had a little
Russian, and I some German and French;
so between us we mixed up a polyglot,
which answered indifferently well.
They were bound, we learned, for Pe-tropaulouski,
tho seaport of Kamtschatka,
and purposed to winter there. It was not
a pleasant prospect, certainly, to ex-
;thHnge for my anticpated Christmas
famide with an old friend at San Jose ;
but we had still a slhn chance of being
taken off from either the vessel or the
port, and "any thing in life was better,"
as O'Shea remarked, "than following the
tea-chests, and starving of thirst upon
brandy and cigars "
Of course, you have always looked up-on
Kamtschatka as the jumping-off place,
and Petropaulouski—if you were not in
blissful ignorance of its existence—as tho
residence of the last of man. So did I,
dear reader, until I went there ; and be-ing
convinced against my will, I am much
of the same opinion still, as the old rhyme
gives me prccederit; nevertheless, Kam-tschatka
is a very tolerable country—for
Siberia and the Samotdes dwell somewhat
farther north.
Ir, boasts—the country, I moan—ofa
first-chop mountain, Klioutscherski by
name—pronounce it, if you dare—a lively
volcano, an annual earthquake or so, and
hunting and fishing fit for the Czar him-self.
As to the town, though it is built of
logs, warmed with brick stoS^es and glaz-ed
with talc, it would be very much like
other towns of a Russian origin, but for
the singular and somewhat uncomfortable
fact that, of its iwo thousand inhabitants,
fully three fourths are of the canine per-suasion.
It is certainly a trifle humilia-ting
to biped selfsufficiency to find itself
so largely in tho minority, especially
when "the administration" has such a
boisterous habit and manner of asserting
its supremacy.
However, tho snug little harbor of Pe-ter
and Paul—'the heavens be their bed!'
(O'Shea)—with its girdle of snow-chap-ped
mountains, rosy with hues of sunset,
looked very inviting after our long C()n-templation
of the viewless horizon whe'rc
the tea chests had vanished ; and its rug-ged
shore, albeit so close to tho nether
fires that the heat is said to come thro\igh
and melt great caverns utuler the snows,
felt very firm and substantial after the
perils of the sea, while the kindly wel-come
of tho biped Petropaulouskans went
far to reconcile us to the chorus of ca-nine
remonstrunce with which it was ac-companied.
Any of the American residents—and
tho universul Yankee nation was, as usual,