But far different was the feeling when it was known that the "man that married Atwater" was to conduct the exercises. Then the soldiers remembered that they were New Englanders; and that here also God's Sabbath shed its silent influence, far though they were from the rude hills and rocky shores of home. 'Tis curious how a little leaven of memory will sometimes work in the heart. Here was half a regiment of men, who had come to fight the battles of their country. As with one accord they had left the amenities of peaceful life behind them, and assumed the rugged manners of war. Of late they had seemed almost oblivious of the fact that God, and Christian worship, and Christian rules of life were still in existence. But to-day they were reminded. To-day the child was awakened--the child that had known the wholesome New England nurture, that had sat on mother's knee, and had its earliest thought tuned to the music of Sunday bells; the child that lay hidden in the deep heart of every man of them, the same lived again, and looked forth from the eyes, and smiled once more in the softened visage of the man. And the man was carried back, far from these strange scenes, far from the relentless iron front of war, across alien lands, and over stormy seas,--carried back by the child yearning within,--to the old door yard, the village trees, the family fireside, the family pew, and the hushed congregation. It was Mr. Egglestone's aim, in the beginning of the sermon he preached that morning, to remind the soldiers of their childhood. "It is a thought," he said, "which almost moves me to tears,--that all these hardy frames around me were but the soft, warm, dimpled forms of so many infants once. And nearly every one of you was, I suppose, watched over by tender parents, who beheld, with mutual joy, the development of each beautiful faculty. The first step taken by the babe's unassisted feet, the first articulate word spoken by the little lisping lips,--what delight they gave, and how long were they remembered! And what thoughts of the child's future came day and night to those parents' breasts! and of what earnest prayers was it the subject! And of all the parents of all those children who are here as men to-day, not one foresaw a scene like this; none dreamed that they were raising up patriots to fight for freedom's second birth on this continent, in the most stupendous of civil wars. "But Providence leads us by strange ways, and by hidden paths we come upon brinks of destiny which no prophet foresaw. Now the days of peace are over. Many of you who were children are now the fathers of children. But your place is not at home to watch over them as you were watched over, but to strive by some means to work out a harder problem than any ever ciphered on slates at school."