Suddenly the flash of a gun in Charleston harbor startled the land like an electric shock, and in a moment all the currents of its life were changed. The air throbbed with the roll of drums and the blare of bugles; flags fluttered in the sky, like shipwrecked rainbows; and for the first time in their lives millions of people realized what the old flag stood for. Men walked about with an unwonted flame in their eyes, and women, quick to comprehend the agony and bitter sacrifices of the years to come, and hiding in their hearts the never-lifting shadow of their fears, wept and prayed, in the silence of their rooms, that this cup might pass away. Then came the calls for men, swiftly following one after another, and sweeping away, in successive surges, the very blossom and flower of the youth and manhood of the land. Seventy-five thousand first; then three hundred thousand, and three hundred thousand more, until the total exceeded two million seven hundred and seventy-two thousand; and in almost every home throughout the length and breadth of the land there were vacant places by the hearthstone and aching voids in the heart, that, in hundreds of thousands of cases, would nevermore be filled. Many of you, perhaps, have seen Rogers’s statuette, “One More Shot.” Some time ago, while looking at a copy of it in a shop window, a soldier friend said: “Two of the finest types of our volunteers are represented in that group.” The martial pose of the central figure is superb; the boyish grace of his kneeling comrade is no less striking. The one represents a young man of twenty-five or thirty; his companion is a mere boy. The elder, tall, alert, resolute, looks intently forward. His broken left arm is held deftly in the folds of his coat; his gun rests against his body, and his right hand is seeking his cartridge-box. Martial, masterful, manly—there were dozens of men in every regiment who might have stood for the model of this figure. The younger, sitting on a knapsack engaged in binding up a wounded leg, and placidly indifferent to everything else, fairly represents a still larger class of our volunteers—the laughing, joking, rollicking boys, who were heroes without heroic feeling, and equal to martyrdom without one spark of a martyr’s fire.