dling with anger.

'Help! For God's sake!' he shrilled impatiently, his hands flying in the
air. The Printer seemed to be gasping for breath.

'Go and stick your head out of the window and get through,' he shouted
hotly to the man.

He turned to his writing--a thing dearer to him than a new bone to a
hungry dog.

'Then you may come and tell me what you want,' he added in a milder
tone.

Those were days when men said what they meant and their meaning had more
fight in it than was really polite or necessary. Fight was in the air
and before I knew it there was a wild, devastating spirit in my own
bosom, insomuch that I made haste to join a local regiment. It grew
apace but not until I saw the first troops on their way to the war was I
fully determined to go and give battle with my regiment.

The town was afire with patriotism. Sumter had fallen; Lincoln had
issued his first call. The sound of the fife and drum rang in the
streets. Men gave up work to talk and listen or go into the sterner
business of war. Then one night in April, a regiment came out of New
England, on its way to the front. It lodged at the Astor House to leave
at nine in the morning. Long before that hour the building was flanked
and fronted with tens of thousands, crowding Broadway for three blocks,
stuffing the wide mouth of Park Row and braced into Vesey and Barday
Streets. My editor assigned me to this interesting event. I stood in the
crowd, that morning, and saw what was really the beginning of the war in
New York. There was no babble of voices, no impatient call, no sound
of idle jeering such as one is apt to hear in a waiting crowd. It stood
silent, each man busy with the rising current of his own emotions,
solemnified by the faces all around him. The soldiers filed out upon the
pavement, the police having kept a way clear for them, Still there was
silence in the crowd save that near me I could hear a man sobbing. A
trumpeter lifted his bugle and sounded a bar of the reveille. The clear
notes clove the silent air, flooding every street about us with their
silver sound. Suddenly the band began playing. The tune was Yankee
Doodle. A wild, dismal, tremulous cry came out of a throat near me.
It grew and spread to a mighty roar and then such a shout went up to
Heaven, as I had never heard, and as I know full well I shall never
hear again. It was like the riving of thunderbolts above the roar of
floods--elemental, prophetic, threatening, ungoverna