:

people (not over-many of them either) hurry up something for their grub. They put wash-kettles on the fire, for soup, for coffee. They set tables on the sidewalks-wagon-loads of bread are purchas'd, swiftly cut in stout chunks. Here are two aged ladies, beautiful, the first in the city for culture and charm, they stand with store of eating and drink at an improvis'd table of rough plank, and give food, and have the store replenish'd from their house every half-hour all that day; and there in the rain they stand, active, silent, white-hair'd, and give food, though the tears stream down their cheeks, almost without intermission, the whole time. Amid the deep excitement, crowds and motion, and desperate eagerness, it seems strange to see many, very many, of the soldiers sleeping the midst of all sleeping sound. They drop down anywhere, on the steps of houses, up close by the basements or fences, on the sidewalk, aside on some vacant lot, and deeply sleep. A poor 17- or 18-year old boy lies there, on the stoop of a grand house; he sleeps so calmly, so profoundly. Some clutch their muskets firmly even in sleep. Some in squads; comrades, brothers, close together and on them, as they lay, sulkily drips the rain.

in

As afternoon passed, and evening came, the streets, the barrooms, knots everywhere, listeners, questioners, terrible yarns, bugaboo, mask'd batteries, our regiment all cut up, etc.,stories and story-tellers, windy, bragging, vain centres of streetcrowds. .

Meantime in Washington, among the great persons and their entourage, a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying disappointment. The worst is not only imminent, but already here. In a few hours-perhaps before the next meal the Secesh generals, with their victorious hordes, will be upon us. The dream of humanity, the vaunted union we thought so strong, so impregnable — lo! it seems already smash'd like a china plate.

But the hour, the day, the night, pass'd, and whatever

returns, an hour, a day, a night like that can never return again. The President, recovering himself, begins that very night— sternly, rapidly, sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in position for future and surer work. If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall indeed a crucifixion day that it did not conquer

him that he unflinchingly stemm'd it, and resolv'd to lift himself and the Union out of it.

Then the great New York papers at once appear'd with leaders that rang out over the land with the loudest, most reverberating ring of clearest bugles, full of encouragement, hope, inspiration, unfaltering defiance. . . . They came in good time, for they were needed. For in the humilation of Bull Run, the popular feeling north, from its extreme of superciliousness, recoil'd to the depth of gloom and apprehension.

(Of all the days of the war, there are two especially I can never forget. Those were the day following the news, in New York and Brooklyn, of that first Bull Run defeat, and the day of Abraham Lincoln's death. I was home in Brooklyn on both occasions. The day of the murder we heard the news early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfast - and the other meals afterwards as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them silently to each other.)

"CUSTER'S LAST RALLY"

WALT WHITMAN

[From Specimen Days. General George A. Custer, with five companies of men, was surrounded by the Sioux Indians at the Little Big Horn River, Montana, on June 25, 1876. He and his entire force were killed after one of the most gallant and desperate fights

ever recorded.

Custer entered the Civil War fresh from West Point, serving with distinction in many of the great battles of the war, and coming out at Appomattox a brigadier-general of cavalry and one of Sheridan's most trusted lieutenants.]

WENT to-day to see this just-finish'd painting by John Mulvany, who has been out in far Dakota, on the spot, at the forts, and among the frontiersmen, soldiers and Indians, for the last two years, on purpose to sketch it in from reality, or the best that could be got of it. Sat for over an hour before the picture, completely absorbed in the first view. A vast canvas, I should say twenty or twenty-two feet by twelve, all crowded and yet not crowded, conveying such a vivid play of color, it takes a little time to get used to it. There are no tricks; there is no throwing of shades in masses; it is all at first painfully real, overwhelming, needs good nerves to look at it. Forty or fifty figures, perhaps more, in full finish and detail in the mid-ground, with three times that number, or more, through the rest swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux, in their war-bonnets, frantic, mostly on ponies, driving through the background, through the smoke, like a hurricane of demons. A dozen of the figures are wonderful. Altogether a western phase of America, the frontiers, culminating, typical, deadly, heroic to the uttermost nothing in the books like it, nothing in Homer, nothing in Shakspere; more grim and sublime than either, all native, all our own, and all a fact. A great lot of muscular, tan-faced men, brought to bay under terrible circumstances death ahold of them, yet every man undaunted, not one losing his head, wringing out every cent of the pay before they sell their lives. Custer (his hair cut short) stands in the middle, with dilated eye and extended arm, aiming a huge cavalry pistol. Captain Cook is there partially wounded, blood on the white handkerchief around his head, aiming his carbine coolly, half-kneeling (his body was afterwards found close by Custer's). The slaughter'd, or half-slaughter'd horses, for breastworks, make a peculiar feature. Two dead Indians,

herculean, lie in the foreground, clutching their Winchester rifles, very characteristic. The many soldiers, their many faces and attitudes, the carbines, the broad-brimm'd western hats, the powder-smoke in puffs, the dying horses with their rolling eyes almost human in their agony, the clouds of warbonneted Sioux in the background, the figures of Custer and Cook with indeed the whole scene, dreadful, yet with an attraction and beauty that will remain in my memory.

TWO BROTHERS, ONE NORTH, ONE SOUTH

WALT WHITMAN

[From Specimen Days. Whitman shows here his strong human sympathy as well as his broad national feeling. It is, of course, a picture drawn from his own experience as a hospital nurse.]

I STAID to-night a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about nineteen years, W. S. P. (2d Maryland, Southern), very feeble, right leg amputated, can't sleep hardly at all -- has taken a great deal of morphine, which, as usual, is costing more than it comes to. Evidently very intelligent and well bred very affectionate - held on to my hand, and put it by his face, not willing to let me leave. As I was lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, "I hardly think you know who I am- I don't wish to impose upon you — I am a rebel soldier." I said I did not know that, but it made no difference. Visiting him daily for about two weeks after that, while he lived (death had mark’d him, and he was quite alone), I loved him much, always kiss'd him, and he did me. In an adjoining ward I found his brother, an officer of rank, a Union soldier, a brave and religious man, (Col. Clifton K. Prentiss, sixth Maryland infantry, Sixth corps, wounded in one of the engagements at Petersburg, April 2 linger'd, suffer'd much, died in Brooklyn, Aug. 20, '65). It was in the same battle both were hit. One was a strong Unionist, the other Secesh; both fought on their respective

sides, both badly wounded, and both brought here after a separation of four years. Each died for his cause.

CHARLES SUMNER

L. Q. C. LAMAR

[Among the addresses delivered in memory of Sumner in the Senate of the United States in 1874, none, perhaps, was more notable than this tribute by Lamar. It marks the beginning of the era of reconciliation between the North and the South.]

MISSISSIPPI regrets the death of Charles Sumner and sincerely unites in paying honors to his memory; not because of the splendor of his intellect, though in him was extinguished one of the brightest lights which have illustrated the councils of the government for nearly a quarter of a century; not because of the high culture, the elegant scholarship, and the varied learning, which revealed themselves so clearly in all his public efforts as to justify the application to him of Johnson's felicitous expression, "He touched nothing which he did not adorn,"

not this, but because of those peculiar and strongly marked moral traits of his character, which gave the coloring to the whole tenor of his singularly dramatic public career, making himself, to a part of his countrymen, the object of as deep and passionate hostility as to another he was one of enthusiastic admiration; and which are not less the cause that unites all these parties, so widely different, in a common sorrow, to-day, over his lifeless remains.

Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom; and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent being having the outward form of man. In him, in fact, the creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a result of education. It was a grand intuitive truth, inscribed in blazing letters upon the tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have been to