The guns of Fort Sumter had flashed along our coast an appeal whose force no words can ever compute. The days had been busy with the assembling of armies, the nights restless with their solemn marches, and forge and factory rang with the strokes of the hammer and the whirr of flying shafts, whose echoes seemed measured to the air of some new Marseillaise. From our homes rushed forth sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, followed by the prayers and blessings of dear women, who yielded them early but willingly to their country. And while regiments clustered along the Potomac, and Washington lay entrenched behind white lines of tents, we find our soldier, fresh from Kansas strifes, in command of the United States Arsenal at St. Louis; and to his prompt action and decided measures at this important juncture the early success of the Union cause in Missouri is to be attributed. For a time St. Louis was the theatre of action. The police commissioners, backed by Governor and Legislature, in the demanded the removal of the Union troops from the grounds of the arsenal, claiming it as the exclusive property of the State, and asserting that the authority usurped by the general government as but a partial sovereignty, and limited to the occupation, for purposes exclusively military, of the certain tracts of land now pending in this novel court of chancery. This highly enigmatical exposition of State rights, pompous and inflated though it was, failed to convince or convert Captain Lyon, who, being unable to detect, in his occupancy of the arsenal, any exaggeration of the rights vested by the Constitution in the general government, declined to abandon his post, and proceeded to call out the Home Guard, then awaiting the arrival of General Harney, and temporarily under his command. His little army of ten thousand men was then drawn up upon the heights commanding Camp Jackson, then occupied by the Missouri militia under Col. Frost, whoso command had been increased by the addition of numerous individuals of avowed secession principles. Uninfluenced by the reception of a note from this officer asserting his integrity and his purpose to defend the property of the United States, and disavowing all intention hostile to the force at the arsenal, Captain Lyon replied by a peremptory summons for an unconditional surrender. He found it incredible that a body assembled at the instigation of a traitorous governor, and acting under his instructions and according to the 'unparalleled legislation' of a traitorous legislature, receiving under the flag of the Confederate States munitions of war but lately the acknowledged property of the general government, could have any other than the as most unfriendly designs upon its enemies. The force of Camp Jackson (which notwithstanding its professed character, boasted its streets Beauregard and Davis) being numerically inferior, and perhaps not entirely prepared to do battle for a cause whose legitimacy must still have been a