ioned officers and privates, more than
the recruiting officers ever knew of,--all with their campaign
stories which will become the staple of fireside talk
forevermore.

"Military merit, or rather, since that is not so readily
estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure of all
claims to civil distinction.

"One bullet-headed general will succeed another in the
presidential chair; and veterans will hold the offices at home
and abroad, and sit in Congress and the State Legislature, and
fill all the avenues of public life. And yet I do not speak of
this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute
something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on
which men have heretofore founded their claims to public
regard; but it behooves civilians to consider their wretched
prospects in the future, and assume the military button before
it is too late."

The day of their arrival in Washington was the date of McClellan's
historic movement on Manassas:--

"On the very day of our arrival sixty thousand men had crossed
the Potomac on their march towards Manassas; and almost with
their first steps into the Virginia mud, the phantasmagory of a
countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which they had
so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away.

"It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a
gigantic enemy, and, beholding him suddenly collapse, had
discovered to himself and the world that he had merely
punctured an enormously swollen bladder.

"There are instances of a similar character in old romances,
where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of the
necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and
muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of
seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the
besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost
foeman, and finds him melt away in the death-grapple. With such
heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter
reckoned.

"The whole business, though connected with the destinies of a
nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous.

"The vast preparation of men and warlike material,--the
majestic patience and docility,--with which the people waited
through those weary and dreary m