They wore red shirts, as if the color of the Garibaldian war for Union in Italy had flashed itself across the sea to be the hue of our own war for Union. With interlinked arms they ranged up and down, and pushed the willing citizens from the pavement, and shouted the day and shouted the night away, with no care but the fear that in the outpour of their death-daring they might not be gathered into the ranks filling up the quota of regiments assigned to Ohio. The time had a sublimity which no other time can know, unless some proportionate event shall again cause the nation to stand up as one man, and the spectacle had a mystery and an awe which I cannot hope to impart. I knew that these boys, bursting from their fields and shops as for a holiday, were just such boys as I had always known, and if I looked at any one of them as they went swaggering and singing up and down I recognized him for what they were, but in their straggling ranks, with their young faces flushed the red of the blouses and their young eyes flaming, I beheld them transfigured. I do not pretend that they were of the make of armies such as I had seen pictured marching in serried ranks to battle, and falling in bloody windrows on the smoke-rolled plain. All that belonged to "Old, unhappy, far-off days," and not to the morrows in which I dwelt. But possibly if I had written that forever-to-be-unwritten novel I might have plucked out the heart of the moment and laid it throbbing before the reader; and yet I might rather have been satisfied with the more subjective riddle of one who looked on, and baffled himself with question of the event.