The Governor took full advantage of my father’s offer of service, and during the next four years he was constantly going back and forth between Boston and Washington. Among his many labors of that time was the work of the Sanitary Commission, of which he was one of the founders and most earnest workers. His own experience as a young man, when he fought with the hardy mountaineers of Crete in the campaign for Greek independence, fitted him particularly well for the work. It made him, also, rather impatient at the well-meant efforts of the Boston people who, in the kindness of their hearts, sent cargoes of superfluities to the embarrassment of the ill-prepared commissariat department. He writes to Andrew from Washington, soon after the departure of the first Massachusetts regiments: “You may depend upon it that when our boys come back, they will laugh heartily at the recital of the fears and sorrows excited among their papas and mamas by the stories of their privations and sufferings on their first march to Washington. The invoice of articles, sent by the _Cambridge_ and other vessels for our troops, contains articles hardly dreamed of even by general officers in actual wars. Hundreds of chests of Oolong tea, tons of white crushed sugar, and then a whole cargo of ice! Many of these things will have to be left behind when the troops go into the field. Their principal value (which is priceless) is as a testimony of the patriotism, zeal, and generosity of the men and women, who felt that they must do something for the cause.” In speaking of the health of the troops, he writes: “There is more need of a _health officer_ than of a chaplain; but the U. S. knows no such officer. Soap! Soap! Soap! I cry but none heed. I wish some provision could be made for army washerwomen; they are more needed than nurses.” I ought to remember far more about the Civil War than I do, for I was six years old when it was declared. On the nineteenth of November of the same year my mother, before dawn, received the inspiration of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but I never heard of this till many years later. Two strong impressions of the wartime remain with me. Coming into the breakfast room one morning, I found my brother Harry standing on his chair, fluttering the newspaper over his head, the rest of the family waving their napkins and crying: “Hurrah! Hurrah! Vicksburg has fallen!” Harry was then going to Boston Latin School and held a commission in the school regiment. I shall surely never forget a certain Sunday morning, when I was walking with my father across Boston Common, to get the mail from the post office. It was a lovely spring day; the elms on the Mall wore the softened look that just precedes the time of leafage. We had stopped to scatter some nuts for the squirrels, when a perfect stranger ran up to my father, grasped him by the arm and panted in his ear: