The work of drill began before we received either arms or uniforms, and from the very first we managed to go through with that essential of camp life, the evening dress parade. Then the grounds would be filled with spectators, mostly home friends: fathers, mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts, bringing with them dainties to supplement what seemed to them the hard fare of camp. We lived well and were not a little spoiled in those days; and when we departed for the front, the mistaken kindness of those who loved us loaded us down with all sorts of knick-knacks for comfort and convenience. Though loath to part with these, our first marching days made us more loath to carry them. When a man's back becomes his only storehouse, he soon finds that riches do not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses. Patent writing-cases, extra socks and mittens, "ponchos" for the shoulders, "havelocks" for the head, etc, etc, began to strew the road, and in a short time we were reduced to an absolutely socialistic equality in this world's goods. Whatever differences remained were those purely personal ones which can be discovered only by experience of each other's ways and characters. In a regiment of a thousand men any extensive acquaintance outside one's own company comes slowly; yet many things served to bring us into fellowship. There was little clannishness, every man in blue was a comrade; yet, after all, each company was a family by itself, and in the company little coteries collected like the eddies in a river pool. On the march two men usually tented together. In camp, when logs or brush were available, four could use their tent pieces to better advantage than two or three, and the camp was thus made more compact. Men came together as tent-mates by a process of natural or social selection. They had been schoolmates or work-fellows in the same shop, perhaps they were related as brothers or cousins, or they had been near neighbours and old friends. So it was at first; but new experiences in toil and peril were often solvents out of which new associations crystallised. Kindred spirits found each other; more and more the company became a greater family within which lesser and more intimate families grew up. Sometimes there were disagreements which broke up first arrangements; but commonly a quiet, almost unnoticed attraction of affinity drew the final groups together in bonds seldom broken save by death or disabling wounds or sickness. A few of these soldierly friendships bind old men even to-day; many more are cherished by lonely survivors as memories too sacred for common talk.