§ 79 An Echo from 1865

I 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 for a season or a decade or a century and rises up again when occasion suits, with its youth miraculously restored.

The narrative runs that in the last days of the war a ragged, wornout, hungry, half-crippled, half-dead Confederate straggler was limping along a Virginia highway striving to catch up with his command. Where there was a puddle in the ruts he stopped to bathe his bruised and bleeding feet. As he sat at the roadside dabbling his swollen toes in the water a Union skirmisher, 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 hell of a git you got!”