Sometime after the great "War of Northern Aggression," otherwise known in the U.S. as the "Civil War," a certain Confederate officer happened to make a chance remark about how, among the "Yankee Armies," the only true gentlemen were to be found in New York. Asked what he meant, the man explained thus:
"One day early in the war, out on the frontier, a group of Yankees was searching the town where I lived looking for contraband. I was taken and brought to their headquarters, where I was questioned by two officers, the one from New York and the other from Massachusetts. They insisted that I had a store of rifles behind a brick wall. I denied the accusation, of course.
"'I give you my word of honor," I said, 'that I have no rifles concealed in my brick wall.'
"Well, the New Yorker was a gentleman. He ceased questioning me and accepted my word of honor. But the Massachusetts man was not a gentleman at all. He not only pulled down the brick wall but he confiscated all my rifles ..."