There is but one _three_-months (pronounced with the accent strongly resting on the numeral adverb, after the Hibernian). All others are spurious imitations. I refer to the early days of the war: the dark days that followed the first fall of Sumter, when our Southern friends had just finished the last volume of the lexicon of slavery, that for so long a time had defined away our manhood, our national honor, and our birthright of freedom, with such terrible words as 'coercion,' 'secession,' 'fratricidal war,' 'sovereign States,' and what not; before we had begun to look without fear even at the title page of the new Gospel of Liberty: the days when we were mudsills and greasy mechanics, whose pockets were to be touched: the days, in short, when we were still inclined to crawl upon our bellies, from the preference arising out of long and strong habit. Then, you remember, the rebellion was to be crushed in sixty days. So the President issued his proclamation, of date the 15th of April, A. D. 1861 (and of the independence of the United States the _first_), calling out SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND men for ninety days to do it. On the same day we were mustered into the service as a part of this gigantic force of seventy-five thousand, at the bare suggestion of whose numbers the refractory South was confidently expected to abandon its rash enterprise, and kindly resume its sway over us. Before the awful ceremony known as 'mustering in,' we were sixty odd excited young gentlemen, hailing from and residing in all parts of the country. After it we were Company N, commanded by Captain John H. Pipes, of the First Regiment of District of Columbia Volunteers, commanded by Colonel Charles Diamond, as the muster rolls called us, or the 'American Sharpshooters,' as we called ourselves.