But fair Oneida showed that war was in the land, removed though it might be from the great centres of recruiting operations. Joe Harris had noticed that a recruiting tent for McQuade's gallant Fourteenth stood in the middle of Genesee Street, only a little way above the hotels, with drums beating and flags and placards exhibited; and even in the fields she saw traces of the effort to answer the President's last demand for troops. Where on the visits of previous years she had seen only men toiling in the sunshine, many women were laboring now, and the change was significant. The homes of Oneida had already given of their best and bravest to the cause of the nation, and still the Moloch of war demanded more!--more, ever and continually more! There was a reminder of the war, too, within the coach, and a reminder of the mode in which the recruiting service was being conducted. On one of the front seats sat a fine-looking young man, bright-eyed and keen-faced, in the shoddy uniform of a private. His conversation was at once that of a patriot and a gentleman; and it did not require many moments of unavoidable listening for the young girl to discover that he was well educated. Further conversation between himself and other passengers who seemed to know and respect him, showed that he had abandoned his studies in a leading institution, to answer the call of the country--that mathematics and military science had formed a considerable part of his studies--that he had had some hopes, when he enlisted, of obtaining the grade of a subaltern officer, when he should succeed in procuring sufficient enlistments--that by his personal efforts and fervid eloquence he had already succeeded in enlisting more than fifty men for the regiment with which he was connected, and was then on his way to another section of the county to make further efforts in the same direction--and that he was still a "full private," with a certainty of rising no higher, because he had neither money nor political influence to put him forward. So that this young patriot and soldier, who showed the power and energy of his nature in every glance of his eye and every word he spoke, was to be kept in the lowest position known to the service, and commanded by men who had never heard of a book on military science or tactics, a week before, but who could buy commissions or command a certain number of votes at a town-meeting! Josephine Harris had studied the current history of the time, enough to know and recognize the picture set before her, and to say, silently and between her set teeth: "Oh, I wish I was only a man, to start out with a horsewhip and lash these incapables until they howled!"