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Show As Told by Irvin S. Cobb AN'ECHO FROM 1865 T RATHER guess they have been telling this one ever since the war between the states. Indeed for all I know to the contrary it may date back as far as the first and second Punic wars. For a good story never really dies. It merely goes into retirement re-tirement for a season or a decade or "a century and rises up again when occasion suits with its youth miraculously miracu-lously restored. Now this present story may be ot any age you please, but to the best of my personal knowledge and belief it belongs to our own-Civil war period. I know I first heard it years ago from an old gentleman who had served in a Texas regiment from 1S01 to 1SG5. I had almost forgotten it when here the othe'r day a friend wrote me telling the same yarn' and saying that he had it from his father.. The narrative runs that in the last days of the war a ragged, wornout, hungry, half-dead Confederate straggler strag-gler was limping along a Virginia highway striving to catch up with his command. Where there was a puddle pud-dle in the ruts he stopped to bathe his bruised and bleeding feet. As be sat at the roadside dabbling his swollen swol-len toes in the water a Union skirmisher, skir-misher, well fed and lusty, stepped from behind a tree with his musket raised to his shoulder and yelled out exultantly : "Now I got you !" "Yas," drawled the Southerner, "an" a h 1 of a git you got !" ( by the Central Press Association.) O |