Stran

and spirits rose in proportion. Every afternoon thousands, including beauty and fashion, went out on the Fourteenth street road to see the Seventh regiment parade at Camp Cameron. The reviews of the Rhode Islanders at the Patent Office, the Twelfth New York at Franklin Square, the Seventy-first New York at the Navy Yard, and the Marines at the Barracks, also drew together admiring crowds. gers began to come in to see the show, children were everywhere seen playing at soldiers in the streets the ladies were delighted with the officer-beaux, and the strains of music from the numerous military bands. There seemed to be one continual drum-beat. People were awakened by the reveillé, walked with measured tread during the day, and were lulled by the tattoo at night. All seemed more like a grand gala season than a serious work of war.

Ere a month, another change had taken place. Over two hundred thousand soldiers were now collected in camps, which dotted every vacant space around the city. Among the residents the novelty had passed away, and immense processions scarce attracted notice; while the ears had become so accustomed to music, that the most melodious sounds were hardly heard, and the drum and fife were as much a matter of course, as the noise of the

All manner of line, had taken Property hold

omnibuses to an old New Yorker. Every hotel was full, every house occupied. tradesmen, chiefly in the sutler possession of stores and shops. ers began to feel encouraged, or at least to think they were to have one more chance before the "owls" came in. The broad sidewalks could scarcely accommodate the throngs, while the intemperance and vice which follows in the wake of an army was only too apparent.

Grand reviews now took place on the Champ de Mars," over by the Alms House, and more people visited that unpopulated part of the town in a day, than had been there before in fifty years. The Long Bridge, the Chain Bridge, Tenallytown, and the road to Alexandria became objects of intense interest. But there was no gala look about it. There was the pomp and circumstance, indeed, but the reality was brought home to all,-the fact that serious conflict was at hand.

And soon came the results, when the wounded and the dying and the stragglers from Manassas came in by thousands, and, for a few days, agony and disorder took the place of parade and drill. People had not yet become accustomed to such horrors.

But they did become accustomed even to that, when the next summer found Washington

one vast hospital, when the whole of the Judiciary Square, Douglas Row, the Lunatic Asylum, the City Hall, many churches, the Patent Office, the Capitol, and numerous country houses, were filled with the sick and the wounded, friends and foes together, when those who had previously acted as belles were called to act the part of nurses, and the resources of the benevolent all over the country were taxed to the utmost.

This, too, soon became an old story, and men spoke of the thousands in hospital with scarcely more concern than they had previously talked of hundreds. In future years, when all this becomes matter of history, they will wonder at the apathy with which they gazed upon the scene, and perhaps realize in some degree, how it was that the French Revolutionists became so inured to the work of terror, that they danced in the prisons, in sight of the tumbril.

IV.

WHAT THE SOLDIERS THOUGHT.

AND what was the impression made upon the military? In the midst of the state of suspense-after the fall of Sumter-a couple had walked along the Avenue to the Capitol, in

tensely depressed by the long faces and anxious looks they encountered on either hand. Gazing on the unfinished dome, one of them remarked in a most desponding tone, "I wonder if it will ever be finished!" "Yes, Ma'am!" was the immediate reply, coming from a sentinel hitherto unnoticed, who was standing on the terrace above. He was one of the Massachusetts regiment which had passed through Baltimore on the 16th April, and had seen the first blood shed in the war. That this man should feel so confident of his position, was, as it were, a rebuke to us civilians for our want of faith, and the incident served to reassure those to whom it was related.

An officer of a regiment which was afterward quartered in the Capitol, said that some of the men were much surprised to find operatives at work upon that edifice. "We had hastened hundreds of miles to protect this building, and when we arrived we found men fluting columns and carving cornices, as if there were no thought of danger; and it was really a pleasant thing in the morning to hear the creak of the derrick, as it seemed to show that those on the spot and in power did not despair for the Republic;" when afterward it was proposed to suspend the work, one of the officers requested that it might be continued until his

men went away, as some of them would look upon it as a bad omen for the future.

A majority of the soldiers visited Washington for the first time when they came to defend it, and most of them experienced a sensation of intense disappointment as they marched up the dusty Avenue, and saw so little that was in keeping with their ideas of a city, as formed by the contrast with Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. For, although they did not expect to see a great city, they reasonably supposed that the place, as far as it went, would show something more in keeping with the public edifices than the scattered and cheap brick structures which, to a great extent, predominate.

"Hardly worth defending, except for the éclât of the thing," said one. All understood perfectly well the importance of the place as the repository of archives, and, therefore, the symbol of the Government; but few seemed to attach any interest to it as the city founded by Washington, entirely the property of the nation, and identified in all its interests with the Union. Most of them, like the sentinel of the Capitol, felt that the national pride was involved in retaining and defending it against attack, and some probably felt, like him, that our selfrespect as a people called upon us to finish the works we had begun, or at least not to be de