Having spent some years in Paris, where he worked as an agent for that now-extinct old worthy, John Arthur, earning a living which enabled him to present a highly respectable figure, he clearly felt a call, he tells us, to join the North in 1861, when the kindling American Civil War made the States a kind of promised land for all sorts of adventurous spirits, most of whom, it may be supposed, were still feeling the influences of the comparatively fresh Napoleonic legend. Taking out a passport in the name of Henri Le Caron, young Beach shipped on the _Great Eastern_, then about to take her maiden trip across the Atlantic, and landed duly in New York, where the military authorities enlisted him as a private in the Pennsylvania Reserves. Le Caron—he was never after 1861 known by the name of Beach—passes over his military career with unexpected haste in his autobiography, it must be said. He was present, he tells, at important engagements during the course of the war, first as an infantry soldier, subsequently as a cavalryman, receiving promotion and being especially detailed for scouting operations. In 1864 he was gazetted second lieutenant and by 1865 had attained the rank of regimental adjutant with the title of Major—a rank which became, it may be said in passing, at the close of the war, so common throughout the States, that humorists were wont to tell how in 1866 it was impossible to throw a brick in any given direction where men happened to assemble without hitting an officer of that standing.