“Backward, turn backward, O, time in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight.” But alas! this and my hungry heart-cry of “Mother, come back from that echoless shore,” are alike vainly uttered. Having long had this in mind, I now for the first time give to the world a simple little story of the early part of my life. It is a story of the war without much war in it. My first recollections of the Civil War (which I always thought very uncivil) are of the days of ’61, after Sumter had been fired upon, when each night one of the neighbors would come into our home, and she and my parents would discuss the prospects of war, which at first though a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, was even then lowering darkly upon us. We didn’t get the newspapers daily then as we do now, but whenever one could be obtained, my mother would read the news aloud, while I lay in my trundle bed, listening and cowering with fear. Who shall say that children do not enter into the spirit of current events? I had all a child’s fear of war, and that fear hung over me, for a time, as a dark cloud, for I thought the battles would be fought at our very doors. [Illustration] THE JOURNEY IN September, 1862, my father, Dr. Coridon Morrow, offered his services to his country, and was appointed Assistant Surgeon of the 43d O. V. I. His first work was at the battle of Corinth, Miss., which occurred on the 4th and 5th of October. Soon after the battle, owing to bad water and change of climate, he was taken dangerously ill, and wrote my mother an almost illegible scrawl, begging her to come to him at once. We had broken up housekeeping at our home in the village of Bainbridge, Ohio, and gone to Aberdeen, on the Ohio river, to spend the winter with relatives.