To the blasphemous challenge of secession, our young men, fully advised of the exceeding preciousness of life and yet thoroughly instructed how to dare and die, hurled back deathless daring and defiance. Their eyes, fixed on their idealized leaders, shining like white statues amid the black wreckage of rebellion, they marched into the flaming vortex with new, strange implements in their hands and "hot unutterabilities in their hearts." These were the boys of '61, the raw recruits of the dawning conflict. With them went the memory of the girls they left behind them, many of whom were afterwards lost in the shuffle. But the memory, then infinitely sweet, was hourly refreshed by a contemplation of the tangible Testament and pin-cushion. With them went the toe-ache of tight boots, earthly, sensual, devilish, and a flushed consciousness, even when drilling in the awkward squad, that the eyes of the universe were upon them. With them also, or following them, or mayhap meeting them in the dreamy borderland of Kentucky or Missouri to which he is fortuitously indigenous, went the harmless, necessary Mule. He was a child of wrath, with a throat for melody spacious as the funnel of a cyclone; with dexter and sinister ears of renown; with eyes foxy but sad, and saddest when he sang. He carried with him the appetite of a Chippewa maiden clad in cavalry trowsers and a tentfly; also an inherited capacity to stand indefinitely on one foot and kick vehemently with all the others. He was reliable as grandfather's clock and prompt as the railway mail service. He was under a recognizance to support the constitution of the United States, and stamp out the Confederacy to the best of his ability. He was a raw recruit likewise. When men were beating the wrong way their plowshares into swords, he was out of a job on a dull labor market and could the better be spared. How much of the issues and principles at stake his comprehensive intelligence intelligently comprehended will perhaps never be known. He did not attend crowded war meetings in country school-houses and waste his rhetoric on the fetid air. It may fairly be surmised, however, that he knew better than any northern croaker the futility of trying to repossess our surrendered fortresses with writs of replevin; knew better than any southern fire-eater the folly of attempting to build up a republic with a live negro wriggling under the corner-stone; knew and would gladly have proclaimed, that no lapse of slip-shod years, no hoariness of unchallenged usage, no deftest hammerings of forensic sophistry can ever fashion a vested right out of a ragged wrong.