big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their
slender figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our
windows. A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the water's
edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who
looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall,"
he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange
physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our
present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the
surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared
over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable
grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of
fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed
by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable
not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary
times had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern
people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting
that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon
gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor
of forging iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of
our free working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not
drowned. The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only
to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to
conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to
build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer
brute matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in
new shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a
man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it,