TRUE COURAGE.
“Some men are more courageous than others, and
some an't,” said Mrs. Partington, as the conversation
turned upon heroic deeds. She was the widow of a
corporal of the “last war,” and her estimate of heroic
deeds, as may be supposed, was based upon a thorough
knowledge of what those deeds were. “Some will go
to the Chimera to exercise feats of arms, and some will
exercise their feats of legs by coming away. It needs
more courage to face danger in the dark — to be waked
up in the night by the howling salvages, with their tommyhawks
and scalpel-knives, or to hear midnight buglars
breaking into your house, or, like the lady who waked
up in the night and found a big nigger man standing
right horizontally by the side of her bed. It takes
great, great courage to meet such things, depend upon
it.” The blood mantled to her cheek, like the hue of a
damask rose-bush in bloom on the side of a yellow-painted
house; heroism sat behind her spectacle-bows,
and peeped out of the glasses; while Ike was engaged
in putting a clean paper dicky and a black cravat upon
a “marble bust of Pallas,” just forninst our closet-door,
— only this, and nothing more.
