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Ill IN THE BACK Force, as you may know, is like the King, and never dies. It endlessly transmits itself through the same or some other shape. Drop a stone in a pond, and the wave-rings may seem to expire as they widen, but they do not; through friction or impact or something, they merely become invisible. You can stop a cannon-ball, but you cannot kill its speed; its speed is immortal and undergoes instant resurrection, taking the new shape of heat. The cannon-ball becomes red hot and sends heat waves off into infinity. Scientific men have told you all this as they have told me, and judging from the delightful events which I shall proceed to narrate, I should not wonder if the scientific men were right. I. The Storing Of The Energy Once upon a time the army had a wet-nurse instead of a secretary of war. The nurse fed our soldiers upon speeches, milk-and-sugar speeches, all over the country. He told them he was going to right their wrongs. Now, as they didn't know that they had any wrongs, this both surprised and pleased them. They liked to hear him inform them that it was they who from the first had won our battles upon land and sea. " Who " (he would ask rhetorically), " who endured the bitter cold, the frozen snow, at Valley Forge?" And as they hadn't the slightest idea, what more agreeable than to learn it was themselves ? " Let us honor George Washington " (he would exclaim), " let us not forget that great and good man! but let us remember also the honest soldier without whose aid George Washington could never have durriven the Burritish tyrant from our beloved shores of furreedom!" He always spoke of the " honest" soldier, and therefore the average enlisted man very naturallyfelt that somehow George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses Grant were all well...
