As to the incident which touches me personally. I recall the forlorn hope of my regiment composed of thirty men under the command of Lieutenant Ralph Bell, third Lieutenant of my company and the youngest officer of the _Palmetto Regiment_, being only in his twenty-first year. Those who knew him well remember his tall, lithe but soldierly figure, his light hair and gentle blue eyes, and his face almost feminine in its delicate beauty. Most vividly does he come back to my memory, as he sprang forward leading that forlorn hope, as cheerily as if he were going to meet his bride, and with the blood trickling from a wound upon his right cheek, pointing upward to the castle with the hilt of his sword, its blade having been shivered by a grape shot. But only two years later, he passed away among strangers in (California) far distant from his home, and his eyes closed in a strange land in death by the brotherly ministrations of his old comrade-in-arms Colonel Charles J. Murphy, who was himself a gallant actor on that field, though but a youth of seventeen years. Well indeed has the poet written, “The bravest are the tenderest. The loving are the daring.” But to continue my cursory narrative of events that would require a volume to detail them fully. Worth’s division pressed the enemy closely on his line of retreat to the eastern or San Cosmo gate of the city. General Scott decided to make his main attack at that gate, deeming it the most vulnerable point. With that view he ordered General Quitman with his division, to make a feint, and occupy the attention of the enemy at the Garita de Belén on the west. Quitman’s command moved rapidly along the causeway leading to the city near the margin of the lake, carrying several batteries of the enemy, he having determined to convert the intended feint into a real attack and win a victory in violation of orders. Far to the front the New York volunteers, the _Palmetto Regiment_, and Captain James Stewart’s company of regular rifles sprang from arch to arch of the great stone aqueduct, firing with rapidity as they advanced. Drum’s battery galloped rapidly to the front, and opened an effective fire, which was at once replied to by the enemy, with at least twenty heavy guns. In a few minutes nearly every officer and man of the battery was killed or wounded. Its chivalric commander lay in the road with both thighs shattered by a cannon ball, but true to the line of his duty, living and dying, he called out to the Infantry in the arches, “For God’s sake save my guns!” They quickly responded, and met the advancing foe with the bayonet, driving them back, and following them into their works, and the last sounds that reached the ears of the noble captain Simon Drum, were the victorious shouts of his comrades at the gate. The magnificent Infantry of P. F. Smith’s and Pierce’s Brigades, were also at this time delivering a destructive fire at the enemy on our flanks.