Every time I see the citizen soldiers of the National Guard march down the avenue I have a choking sensation in my throat, and sometimes tears come to my eyes. A young man who stood beside me one day when I could not help making an exhibition of myself, said, “What’s the matter with you?” And my answer was, “They make me think of the men I saw going to the front in war-times.” Then the young man laughed, and said, “What can you remember of the war?” He was about twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, and the Civil War was to him something to be read of in a dusty book. I was five years old when the war began. I could read and write, and was going to school. Many of the things which I saw then made impressions on my mind never to be effaced this side of the grave. I was living in the city of Pittsburg, at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, whose waters, joined in the Ohio, flowed past many a field that will live in history. Pittsburg was not in the midst of the war, but it was close enough to some scenes of action, especially Gettysburg, and important enough as a point of departure and source of supplies to keep it filled with soldiers, and warmly in touch with all that was going on. What I wish to tell you is something about the way it all appeared to a boy. My first recollection is of my father reading from a newspaper the announcement that Major Anderson and his garrison at Fort Sumter had been fired upon. That was in April, 1861, and I was in my sixth year; but I remember that I was greatly excited, and wondered what it all meant. It must have been later than that when my father gave me an explanation, which I remember to this day. He said: “My little boy, there is war between the people of the North and those of the South. The people in the South want to have slaves, and the people in the North say they must not have them. So the people of the South say they will not belong to the United States any more, and the people of the North say they must. And so they are fighting, and the fighting will go on till one or the other is beaten.”[1]