Our orders home, and tidings of the attack on Fort Sumter, came by the same mail, some time in June. There were then no cables. The revulsion of feeling was immediate and universal, in that distant community and foreign land, as it had been two months before in the Northern States. The doughfaces were set at once, like a flint. The grave and reverend seigniors, resident merchants, who had checked any belligerent utterance among us with reproachful regret that an American should be willing to fight Americans, were converted or silenced. Every voice but one was hushed, and that voice said, "Fight." I remember a tempestuous gathering, an evening or two before we sailed, and one middle-aged invalid's excited but despondent wish that he was five hundred men. Such ebullitions are common enough in history, for causes bad or good. They are to be taken at their true worth; not as a dependable pledge of endurance to the end, but as an awakening, which differs from that of common times as the blast of the trumpet that summoned men at midnight for Waterloo differs from the lazy rubbing of the eyes before thrusting one's neck into the collar of a working day. The North was roused and united; a result which showed that, wittingly or unwittingly, the Union leaders had so played the cards in their hands as to score the first trick. Our passage home was tedious but uneventful. I remember only the incident that the flag-officer on one occasion played at old-time warfare of his youth, by showing to a passing vessel a Spanish flag instead of the American. The common ship life went on as though nothing had happened. On an August evening we anchored in Boston lower harbor, and Mr. Robert Forbes, then a very prominent character in Boston, and in most nautical matters throughout the country, came down in a pilot-boat, bringing newspapers to our captain, with whom he was intimate. Then we first learned of Bull Run; and properly mortified we of the North were, not having yet acquired that indifference to a licking which is one of the first steps towards success. Some time after the war was over an army officer of the North repeated to me the comment on this affair made to him by a Southern acquaintance, both being of the aforetime regular army. "I never," he said, "saw men as frightened as ours were--except yours." The after record of both parties takes all the sting out of these words, without lessening the humor.