I must not allow the reader to suppose that I present Carter as a type of all regular officers. There were men in the old army who never tasted liquors, who never blasphemed, who did not waste their substance in riotous living, who could be accused of no evil practices, who were models of Christian gentlemen. The American service, as well as the English, had its Havelocks, its Headly Vicars, its Colonel Newcomes. Nevertheless I do venture to say that it had also a great many men whose moral habits were cut more or less on the Carter pattern, who swore after the fashion of the British army in Flanders, whose heads could carry drink like Dugald Dalgetty's, and who had even other vices concerning which my discreet pen is silent.
Within a week after the conversation above reported Colburne opened a recruiting office, advertised the "Putnam Rangers" largely, and adorned his doorway with a transparency representing Old Put in a brand-new uniform riding sword in hand down the stone steps of Horse-neck. His company, as yet in embryo, was one of the ten accepted out of the nineteen offered for Carter's regiment. It was supposed that the name of a West Point colonel would render the organization a favorite one with the enlisting classes; and accordingly all the chiefs of incomplete companies throughout the State of Barataria wanted to seize the chance for easy recruiting. But Colburne soon found that the dullness of a young lawyer's office was none too prosy an exordium for the dullness of a recruiting office at this particular period. Passed was that springtide of popular enthusiasm when companies were raised in a day, when undersized heroes wept at being rejected by the mustering officer, when well-to-do youths paid a hundred dollars to buy out a chance to be shot at. Bull Run had disenchanted some romantic natures concerning the pleasures of war, and the vast enlistments of the summer had drawn heavily on the nation's fighting material. Moreover, Colburne had to encounter obstacles of a personal nature, such as did not trouble some of his competitors. A student, a member of a small and shy social circle, neither business man nor one of the bone and sinew, not having belonged to a fire company or militia company, nor even kept a bar or billiard-saloon, he had no retainers nor partisans nor shopmates to call upon, no rummy customers whom he could engage in the war-dance on condition of unlimited whiskey. He had absolutely no personal means of influencing the classes of the community which furnish that important element of all military organizations, private soldiers. For a time he remained almost as solitary in his office as Old Put in the perilous glory of his breakneck descent. In short the raising of his company proved a slow, vexatious and expensive business, notwithstanding the countenance and aid of the Colonel.