176 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



strength-giving quality of the military engineers of that day; 

 I can say of them as well that they knew how to interpret 

 nature. 



My friend, then Lieutenant Thompson, was some ten years 

 my senior, and we were very near to one another. He was a 

 collateral of Benjamin Thompson, and had a curious likeness to 

 him in face and character. He was an able man in his profes- 

 sion, a hard disciplinarian, iron-willed, though of a very mild 

 manner. He was for the most of the time really commandant 

 of the fort, which, as I recall, had a garrison of two companies, 

 composed of men of a more mutinous quality than I had been ac- 

 customed to see in the old army. His favorite punishment was 

 "stringing up by the thumbs," and the calm, philosophic way 

 in which he would walk around the wights thus suspended, 

 commenting the while on their state of torment, extorted my 

 admiration, and showed me more clearly than I had before 

 seen how hard are the ways by which the common brutal man 

 is broken to the soldier's trade. He was never cruel in this 

 work, merely obdurately effective. I have never seen a higher 

 order of care than he devoted to the inspection of his men and 

 all that related to their well-being. 



In 1862 I chanced to serve for a time under Thompson, then 

 a major, in charge of an artillery camp of a dozen batteries. 

 They were a bad lot, not yet well broken to harness. The way in 

 which he battered them into shape fills me with admiration to 

 this day. He had a capacity for objurgation which was in a way 

 unique; unlike the one other great master of the infernal art, 

 he made no use of the accepted classic phrases, but had in- 

 vented what may be called an anecdotical method altogether 

 his own, in which the blister, constructed in short descriptive 

 phrases, was calculated to remove the hide of the toughest. 

 His applications were punctuated by the grimmest laugh I 

 have ever heard, a strange hollow cackle with no trace of mirth 

 in it. I said to a big limberer of a battery I knew, who had just 

 been excoriated, " Well, , what do you think of that?" Pale- 



