It had been arranged that the batteries should be mustered in the order of the seniority of their captains, and thus the first command to march across the parade was "M" under veteran Captain Braley, who was responding for the second time to the call of his country in time of war. His appearance before the mustering officer was the signal for a round of applause from the group of staff officers gathered at headquarters. In a very few minutes both he and his command had ceased to be militiamen, and had become United States Volunteers—to be followed rapidly by the other eleven batteries of the regiment. As a matter of record, it was exactly 9.34 A.M. when Colonel Woodruff finished administering the oath to the field, staff, and non-commissioned staff officers, thus completing the muster of the regiment. Everything had moved with the regularity of clock-work, and in but little over an hour and a half more than seven hundred and fifty officers and men had answered to their names as called from the muster-rolls, and had sworn to serve the United States faithfully and well for the two years to come. In this connection the statement made in the newspaper history of the Second Massachusetts Infantry must be corrected. It is but a minor point, of course, yet soldiers are wont to be jealously tenacious on minor points affecting their own records. "This regiment," writes the historian of the Second, "was the first to be mustered into the service of the United States, the first to leave Massachusetts, the first to invade Cuba—the first of our regiments to enter the actualities of war." As a strict matter of record, the Second Infantry was mobilized at Framingham on May 3rd, where it completed its muster-in (though "K" Company had been mustered on May 8th) on May 10th. The First Artillery entered the United States service as militia on April 26th, dating its pay-rolls from that day, and had been mustered complete before 10 o'clock in the forenoon of May 9th. It was the first militia regiment in the service; it became the first volunteer regiment in the service. In contending for this recognition it certainly does not seek to rob the Second of its hard-won laurels, for the First and Second, brigaded together for long years, always have been firm friends, though strong rivals. Chained in its posts along shore, the First yet watched with interest and admiration the career of the men from western Massachusetts, and in their trials and triumphs in far-away Cuba their hearts would have warmed could they have heard the verdict of their brethren of the First—"Well done, Second Massachusetts!" PERSONNEL OF THE REGIMENT VIII.