ve felt worse if you had heard
of the death of a very dear friend. But as you thought it over and
reflected upon the wickedness of the act, so deliberate and terrible,
you felt that you would like to see the traitors hung; not that it would
be a pleasure to see men die a felon's death, but because you loved your
country and its flag, with its heaven-born hues, its azure field of
stars! Not that the flag is anything in itself to be protected, honored,
and revered, but because it is the emblem of constitutional liberty and
freedom, the ensign of the best, freest, noblest government ever
established. It had cost suffering and blood. Kings, aristocrats,
despots, and tyrants, in the Old World and in the New hated it, but
millions of men in other lands, suffering, abused, robbed of their
rights, beheld it as their banner of hope. When you thought how it had
been struck down by traitors, when you heard that the President had
called for seventy five thousand troops, you hurrahed with all your
might, and wished that you were old enough and big enough to go and
fight the Rebels.

The drums beat in the street. You saw the soldiers hasten to take
their places in the gathering ranks. You marched beside them and kept
step with the music. The sunlight gleamed from their bayonets. Their
standards waved in the breeze, while the drum, the fife, the bugle, and
the trumpet thrilled you as never before. You marched proudly and
defiantly. You felt that you could annihilate the stoutest Rebel. You
followed the soldiers to the railroad depot and hurrahed till the train
which bore them away was out of sight.

Let us follow them to Washington, and see the gathering of a great army.
The Rebels have threatened to capture that city and make it their seat
of government, and it must be saved.

We have been a quiet, peaceable nation, and have had no great standing
armies of a half-million men. We know but little about war. The Northern
States are unprepared for war. President Buchanan's Secretary of War,
Floyd, has proved himself a thief. He has stolen several hundred
thousands of muskets, thousands of pieces of artillery, sending them
from the Northern arsenals to the South. The slaveholders have been for
many years plotting the rebellion. They are armed, and we are not. Their
arsenals are well filled, while ours are empty, because President
Buchanan was a weak old man, and kept thieves and traitors in places of
trust and power.

At the call of