The recruit of 1861 was of the human various species so dear to the articulating frenzy of Mr. Venus. He was intensely human yet various as life's multiform phases in this resplendent hemisphere. He was a farm boy, perhaps, fresh from the white sheets, and fried chicken, and sweet cream, and angel cake of his ancestral roof, with no experience more thrilling than that of the local press and pulpit arising as the voice of one man to celebrate the production of some abnormal cucumber; he went to town to see the parade, and, vowing he would ne'er enlist, enlisted. He was a store clerk, skilled in pounds, pints and prints, with a thin top dressing of Latin, and a silvery Minnehaha gush of gaiety in every motion. He was a student with columns of logarithms in his head and a theodolite in his stomach; conscientious as a juryman sworn to bring in a verdict according to the law and the lawyers' speeches. He was a mechanic, swart and grim, with steps so energized with mobility that when he walked the pavements rolled and rocked beneath him like waves of the sea. There were howling swells in that period, but he was not of them. Reared in the bland atmosphere of plowshares and pruning-hooks, he had no taste for the big orgies in which they reveled. He was not a fast young man, nor did the fast young men, as a rule, make good soldiers, or soldiers at all. Their furore was not the inspiring sentiment of a war for liberty. Their recklessness was not bravery; their wild natures accepted no yoke of discipline. These fast young men traveled rapidly, because their road was all down grade. They were the same then as now, the same yesterday, to-day and next century--worthless and fruitless, first, last and forever. Each successive five years brings a new generation of them, as the novices of five years previous, worn out and burned out by dissipation, disappear over the divide and enter that sulphurous enclosure, that stockade of horrors, where the fires of torment are fed with their festering tissues, and the towers of Tophet re-echo the shrieks of their tortured souls. These howling swells, these fast young men, these debauched, debased and dissolute youths, these devotees of the world, the flesh and the flowing bowl, had no part or lot in the sacrifices of that heroic era. The average boy of '61 was of pure metal and exalted worth. The glint of his eye reflected the stars of the flag, and a prophecy of Appomattox was written on his brow. Into the white chambers of his soul only such things could enter as affiliated with the guests already cherished there--his mother, his sister, his sweetheart and his God.