was a cruel comedy acted every day between 1861 and 1865. They
laughed who were not gay, and they seemed indifferent who were fainting
with despair. The courage of battle is mere brutish insensibility
compared with the abnegation of the million mothers who gave their boys
to the bestial maw of war.

The harrowing ceremonial of parting is ended. The train moves slowly out
of the station, and a murmur of sobs and cheers echoes until it is far
beyond the easternmost limits of the city. After a journey of two days
and a night the train readied Philadelphia. Jack was all eyes and ears
for the spectacle the country presented. In every station through which
the regiment passed crowds welcomed the blue-coats. Women fed them, or
those who seemed in need, thinking, perhaps, of their own distant
darlings receiving like tenderness from the stranger.

In Philadelphia, the regiment marched across the city to resume its
journey. It was a cold spring night, and the regimental quartermaster
and commissary had made no provision for the men. Indeed, as the
observant Jack afterward learned, it was part of the plan of the groups
that first began to create great fortunes during the war to make the
soldiers pay for their rations _en route_ to the seat of war, or depend
upon the charity of citizens along the railway lines. The Government
paid for the supplies just the same, while the money went into the
pockets of contractors and quartermasters. After a weary tramp through
what seemed to the soldiers the biggest city in the world, the regiment,
with blistered feet, hungry and cross, were halted before a long, low
wooden building, through whose rough glass windows cheerful lights could
be seen. A rumor spread that they were to have a hot supper, and, sure
enough, they were marched in, dividing on each side of four long tables
that stretched into spectral distance, in the feeble glimmer of the
oil-lamps hanging from the ceiling. Most of the men in Jack's company,
at least, were gently nurtured, but the steaming oysters, cold beef, and
generous "chunks" of bread, filled their eyes with a magnificence and
their stomachs with a gentle repletion no banquet before or after ever
equaled. The feast was set in the same place during four years, by the
Sanitary Society, I think, but the memory of that homely board,
plenteously spread, is in the mind of many a veteran who faced warward
during the conflict.

CHAPTER VI.

ON THE POTOMAC.

The