The great city had gone wild. Not a month before many of Pop's boys had ridiculed the lads of a rival school who had employed a drill-master from the Ninth Regiment and met two evenings a week. But Shorty, after vainly trying to start a rival company among his own mates, had gone over and enlisted in the ranks at Mulholland's. As a drum-boy he was not allowed to handle a musket and "fall in" with the famous regiment to which he was attached. Indeed, he would have had to stand on a step-ladder to load "according to tactics" the long, glistening musket with which the troops were at that time armed. Mulholland's boys had hired a lot of old-fashioned cadet musquetoons, heavy and cumbrous, but they were marvellous weapons in the eyes of the lads. Officers on duty at Governor's Island were frequent visitors at the Primes' at Fourteenth Street, and Shorty could not but hear of the preparations at the arsenal, the effort to send reinforcements and provisions to Major Anderson at Fort Sumter. All the world knew at this time how the "Star of the West" was fired on and forced to put back to sea, but still not one man in five would admit there should be war, and, in the great Democratic community, hundreds and hundreds of people and not a few papers almost openly took sides with the South. Two lads at Pop's actually came to school wearing the colors of South Carolina in their waistcoats, and in the First Latin the Ballous, whose father had embarked his capital in steamships trading with Charleston and Savannah, and Seymour, whose relatives were nearly all Southern, and the Graysons, who were Northerners by birth, but had many kindred in Virginia and Alabama, were all openly "secesh" in their talk. And still lessons went on, and the boys even had time to talk of Snipe and wish him back, and of Hoover and wish him in Jericho. Long ere this, now that there were two absent and Briggs had not a friend or a believer left in the school, all the First Latin had swung round into the conviction that poor Snipe was the victim of circumstances and conspiracy, and that Hoover was the cause of all his woes. The story of the hundred-dollar stealing had begun to be accepted as a fact, though Pop and his assistants could never be got to admit it. The further fact that Hoover and those notorious scamps, the Hulkers, had not been seen in New York since the Christmas holidays had set afloat a story that they had been discovered to be connected in many a piece of rascality. Everything missing at school for over a year was now attributed to Hoover. He had been able, said the boys, to dispose of his plunder through those Hulker fellows, who, despite the money lavished on them by their foolish mother, had debts in many a bar-, billiard-, and pool-room, and were known to have pawned valuable jewelry from time to time. She was with them somewhere in the South, and the gloomy old house in Twenty-first Street was cared