As I loitered, musing, a battalion of our little army strode by us in turn, with soldierly bearing, clad in no gaudy garb, but ready for their bloody work; ready with cold steel to give a cold welcome to the invading foreigner, ready with a prompt volley to put an end to lawless strife at home. After an interval came the first ranks of the citizen soldiery, trim in their workmanlike uniforms, with stretchers, with ambulances, with Gatling-guns. One after another advanced the regiments of the city militia, and no man need doubt that they would be as swift now to go forward to battle as were their former fellow-members whose deeds gave them the right to bear flags emblazoned with more than one battle as hard fought as Marathon or Philippi, Fontenoy or Waterloo. As they swept on down the Avenue in the morning sunlight, with the strident music veiled now and again by ringing cheers, my thoughts went back to the many other thousands I had seen go down that Avenue, now more than a quarter of a century ago, coming from the pine forests and the granite hills of New England, and going to the silent swamps and the dark bayous of the South. In those drear days of doubt I had watched the ceaseless tramp of the troops down that Avenue, a thousand at a time--young, earnest, ardent; and I remembered that I had seen them return but a scant hundred or two, it may be, worn and ragged, foot-sore and heart-sick, but resolute yet and full of grit. Death, like the maddened peasants in the strife of the Jacquerie, fights with a scythe; and for four long years Time held a slow glass and Death mowed a broad swath. There is many a house now where an old woman cannot hear the trivial notes of "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," without a sharp pain in the throat and a sudden vision of the prison-pen at Andersonville. No doubt there is many another woman south of that Mason and Dixon's line which was washed out in the blood of the war where the sentimental strains of "My Maryland" have an equal poignancy and an equal tenderness. Shiloh and Malvern Hill and Gettysburg are names made sacred forever by the deeds done there, and by the dead who lie there side by side in a common grave, where the gray cloth and the blue have faded into dust alike, and there is now naught to tell them apart. It is well that a spring day, fresh after rain and fair with blossoms, should help to keep their memory sweet.