All at once Pittsburg became alive with military preparations. Drums were beating in the streets all day and far into the night. Every hour a detachment of soldiers would march along Smithfield Street, and as I lived just above the corner of it on Second Street, now called Second Avenue, I would run to see every squad go by, till it became tiresome, and nothing short of a regiment could interrupt my play. Those must have been the seventy-five thousand volunteers called for by Abraham Lincoln to serve three months and crush the rebellion. Some of those men came back at the end of their three months, but of that I remember little or nothing. The only thing that made a strong impression on me in the early days of the war, after the attack on Sumter, was the killing of Ellsworth. I suppose every boy knows now how the gallant young Colonel of the New York Fire Zouaves took down the Confederate flag that was flying over an inn in Alexandria, and was shot dead by the proprietor of the house, who was immediately killed by Private Brownell. That incident fired the hearts of all the boys in Pittsburg. We could not understand much of what we heard about the movements of troops, and I have forgotten everything which may have reached my ears at the time. But we could understand the murder of Ellsworth, and to this day I remember how we little fellows burned with indignation, and how we all wished we had been Brownell to shoot down the innkeeper. Somehow the untimely fate of the brave young Zouave commander appealed to us very forcibly, and I think some of us cried about it. It appealed to our mothers too, and suddenly the little boys in Pittsburg began to blossom out in Zouave suits. My mother had one made for me--a light-blue jacket with brass buttons, a red cap, and red trousers. She bought me a little flag, and had my picture taken in my uniform, and she has that picture yet. Next she got me a little tin sword; and then two older boys procured blue army overcoats and caps, and borrowed two muskets from the property-man at the theatre, and I used to drill those boys, and march them proudly all over Pittsburg, to the intense delight of the grown-up people, who cheered us wherever we went.