Only two or three of the friends who had formed our College group went to the war; of these my friend Comly, had been one of the earliest, and when I found him officer of the day at the first camp of the volunteers, he gave me what time he could, but he was helplessly pre-occupied, and the whole world I had known was estranged. One morning I met another friend, coming down the State House steps and smiling radiantly; he also was a law student, and he had just been made adjutant of a newly accepted regiment. Almost immediately afterward he was changed to the line, and at the end of the war, after winning its last important battle, John G. Mitchell came out with the rank of brigadier-general, to which the brevet of major-general could scarcely add distinction. By the chances which play with our relations in life I had not known him so well as some others. He was not of the College group; but after the war we came familiarly together in the friendship of the cousins who had become our wives. In that after-time he once held me rapt with the stories of his soldier life, promising, or half promising, to put them down for print, but never doing it, so that now they are lost to that record of personal experience of battle which forms so vital a part of our history. No stories of that life which I have read have seemed to me so frank, so full, so real, as those he told. Our first camp was in our pretty Goodale Park, where I used to walk and talk with the sculptor Ward, and try the athletic feats in which he easily beat me. Now the pine sheds covered the long tables, spread with coffee and pork and beans, and the rude bunks filled with straw, and here and there a boy volunteer frowzily drowsing in them. It was one of the many shapeless beginnings which were to end in the review of the hundred thousands of seasoned soldiers marching to their mustering out in Washington after four years of fire and blood. No one could imagine that any of these boys were to pass through that abyss, or that they would not come safely out. Even after the cruel disillusion of Manassas the superstition of quick work remained with the North, and the three years' quota of Ohio was filled almost as jubilantly as the three months', but not quite so jubilantly. Sons and brothers came with tears to replace fathers and brothers who had not returned from Manassas, and there was a funeral undertone in the shrilling of the fifes and the throbbing of the drums which was not so before. Life is like Hamlet and will oftentimes "put an antic disposition on," which I have never been one to refuse recognition, and now I must, with whatever effect from it, own a bit of its mockery. One of our reporters was a father whose son had been among the first to go, and word came that the boy had been killed at Manassas. I liked the father as I had liked the son, and the old man's grief moved me to such poor offer of consolation as verse could make.