On that April day, when a gun-carriage went rumbling past my store, corner Beacon and Tremont streets, bearing the bodies of Ladd and Whitney, killed in Baltimore, I recorded a vow. As soon thereafter as possible, I turned the key on my mercantile business, and on the twenty-first day of October, 1861, my name was writ large on the enlistment roll; and from that date my time and means were devoted to the business of inducing men to enlist in the Thirteenth Maine Regiment, which was to be attached to General Butler's division for special service,—until the regiment was mustered into the United States service at the arsenal in Augusta,—December 31, 1861. Here we lived in tents half buried in snow, often drilling in snow knee deep, with the mercury at or below zero, till February 18, 1862, at which date we dug ourselves out of several feet of snow and ice and took train for Boston. About midnight we found ourselves in the ‘Cradle of Liberty,’ where, it was supposed, we were to be rocked to sleep, but I don't remember to have seen a single sleeping soldier that night. On the twentieth a battalion of the regiment (four companies) (Colonel Dow and Major Hesseltine) was marched to Long wharf and down between decks of the good steamship Mississippi, in which for many days and nights we were literally rocked to sleep. (The six companies of the regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Rust commanding, sailed from New York.) The next day our voyage began, and before it ended the boys experienced all the charms of ‘life on the ocean wave, and a home on the rolling deep.’ As we rolled and pitched on the passage to Fort Monroe, many a luckless soldier went skating down the icy deck till the lee bulwarks ordered a peremptory halt. The order to halt was not always obeyed with such alacrity. At Fort Monroe we received General Butler and staff. We had previously discovered that the Thirty-first Massachusetts Regiment was stowed somewhere down forward.
At 10 o'clock p. m. on the twenty-fifth, the engines began to throb, and shortly the capes were left astern. Our final (?)
