The Drummer Boy | Page 9

on, and drew his blanket over him. It was not like going to bed in his nice little room at home, with Willie snuggled warmly beside him; yet there was a novelty in this rude and simple mode of life that was charming. His companions, who lay upon the ground around him, kept him awake with their stories long after the lights were out; but at length, weary with the day's excitement, he fell asleep.
There,--a dweller now in the picturesque white city of tents gleaming in the moonlight, ruggedly pillowed on his soldier's couch, those soft brown curls tossed over the arm beneath his head,--the drummer boy dreamed of home. The last night's consultation and the morning's farewells were lived over again in the visions of his brain; and once more his mother visited his bedside; and again his father accompanied him to the recruiting office. But now the recruiting office was changed into a barber's shop, which seemed to be a tent supported by a striped pole; where, at John Winch's suggestion, he was to have his hair trimmed to the fighting-cut. The barber was a stiff-looking officer in epaulets, who heated a sword red-hot in an oven, while Frank preached to him a neat little sermon over his ration. Then the epaulets changed to a pair of roosters with flaming red combs, that flapped their wings and crowed. And the barber, approaching Frank with his red-hot sword, made him lie on his back to be shaved. Then followed an excruciating sense of having his hair pulled and his face scraped and burnt, which made him move and murmur in his sleep; until, a ruthless attempt being made to thrust the sword up his nostrils, he awoke.
Shouts of laughter greeted him. His companions had got up at midnight, lighted a candle, and burnt a cork, with which they had been giving him an artificial mustache and whiskers. He must have been a ludicrous sight, with his countenance thus ornamented, sitting up on his bed, rubbing his eyes open, and staring about him, while Winch and Harris shrieked with mirth, and Ned Ellis flapped his arms and crowed.
Frank put up his hand to his head. O grief! his curls had been mangled by dull shears in the unskilful hands of John Winch. The depredator was still brandishing the miserable instrument, which he had borrowed for the occasion of the fellow who cut the company's hair in the "Owl House."
Frank's sudden awaking, astonishment, and chagrin were almost too much for him. He could have cried to think of a friend playing him such a trick; and to think of his lost curls! But he had made up his mind to endure every thing that might befall him with unflinching fortitude. He must not seem weak on an occasion like this. His future standing with his comrades might depend upon what he should say and do next. So he summoned all his stoutness of heart, and accepted the joke as good-naturedly as was possible under the circumstances.
"I wish you'd tell me what the fun is," he said, "so that I can laugh too."
"Give him the looking-glass," cried Jack Winch, holding the candle, while Ellis stopped crowing, to bring a little three-cornered fragment of a broken mirror, by which Frank was shown the artistic burnt-cork work on his face. He could hardly help laughing himself at his own hideousness, now that the first disagreeable sense of being the sport of his friends had passed.
"I hope you have had fun enough to pay for waking me up out of the queerest dream any body ever had," he said. And he told all about the barber, and the epaulets that became roosters, and the red-hot sword for a razor, etc. Then, looking at himself again in the piece of glass, he called out, "Give me those shears;" and taking them, he manfully cut off his mutilated curls. "There, that isn't exactly the fighting-cut, Jack, but 'twill do. Now, boys, tell some more of those dull stories, and I guess I can go to sleep again."
And he lay down once more, declining to accept an urgent invitation to preach.
"There, boys," said stout Abram Atwater, who had sat all the time cross-legged, a silent, gravely-smiling spectator of the scene, "you shan't fool him any more. He has got pluck; he has shown it. And now let him alone."

IV.
THE OLD DRUMMER AND THE NEW DRUM.
As yet, Frank had no drum. Neither had he any scientific knowledge of the instrument. He was ambitious of entering upon his novel occupation, and was elated to learn, the next morning, that he was to begin his acquaintance with the noble art of drumming that very day.
"The sergeant is inquiring for you," said Abram Atwater, with his mild, pleasant smile, calling him out