his native woods and fields, which, despite the laxity of the game-laws, was tolerably abundant. It was, however, almost wholly practice with the shotgun, and upon wild geese and ducks, quails, partridges, squirrels, and the like-most of the larger game having been exterminated with the Indians. Dr. Holmes, in a famous poem, describes the old “Queen's arm" as forming a common chimney ornament; but I doubt if, in the country districts, one man in fifty had ever used a rifle or a musket in his life. Indeed, the historic weapon is spoken of as being in a damaged condition. If 'Zekiel, however, could not have given Huldah an exhibition of his prowess with the longranged arm, as his countrymen of the South and West might still have donetheir shooting must, at least, have equalled Robin Hood's; they used to drive nails into trees, and hit squirrels and rabbits in the eye, to save the skins, at incredibly long distances with their pea-rifles-the root of the matter was undoubtedly in him. With respect to military drill and discipline, a tradition of training and training-days lingered at that time in the country, and there was the proverbial sprinkling of colonels, majors, and captains; but it seemed to me that the holders of the titles had gained them at some remote period, when a different order of things had prevailed. In the larger centres I am aware that there were regular volunteer organizations of a good degree of efficiency.

Coming like Cincinnatus from the plough, or from the factory, the warehouse, and the commercial or professional office, and even from schools and colleges, these excellent citizen-soldiers were first hived in camps for instruction in the rudiments of war. Literally they were of all sorts and conditions. It is said that no other modern army ever had in its ranks so much talent and even genius as this first American

volunteer force; and the New England contingent was, doubtless, not behind the others. One heard of sculptors, poets, and Latin scholars serving as privates. Possibly the French army, in the Franco-Prussian War, may have furnished a parallel; but probably the number thus accomplished was smaller than supposed. At the beginning, a large proportion of the officers, especially those of lower rank, were about of the same social standing as their men; but the traditions and actual experience of training, and the respect for authority, which has always characterized the New England race, despite certain apparent instances to the contrary, prevented insubordination. In the Middle and Western States, I believe, there was more difficulty, and some amusing stories were told. There was much conning of tactics and drill-manuals on the part of the newly-appointed officers, and he who had practical experience imparted to him who had not. Within and without the camps there were arduous and unwonted exercises; but good-humor prevailed, and several varieties of the American joke are said to date from those weeks of toil. Musketry-practice, not carried to too fine a point, came in due course; also, though sometimes elsewhere, the donning of uniforms, the oft-pictured cap (of French origin), and the darkblue coat and the light-blue trousers that have become historic. Then the different regiments moved southward by land or sea. Whichever the route, they were liable to rough usage before reaching the front. In one notable instance a land-going force, while still unarmed, was almost as severely handled by the mob in a disaffected town as at a later date by the enemy; and those who travelled by sea-in fleets of miscellaneous craft, hastily chartered, and often mere river-boats suited only for inland waters-had a full share of danger, discomfort, and even disaster. Yet

the experience was inspiriting and memorable. The scenes of departure were enthusiastic; rather more noisy than those which speed our parting battalions, Africa-bound in much better vessels, but of the same tenor and tem

per. There were speeches, exhortations, prayers, music, laughter, and the inevitable tears; yet all was taken, I think, somewhat lightly, at least in the earlier departures. Before the final exodus a good many furloughs had been granted, and many families had enjoyed, mostly for the first time in their lives, the spectacle of their men-folk in something other than civilian dress; uniforms being then a comparative rarity in the land, and even so important a personage as the railway conductor frequently undistinguished in this way from his fellow-mortals. Now, I understand it is different. A later stage of the conflict, of course, brought home the actualities of war; the news of meeting armies and the universal tale of losses by death, capture, or disease, and of disablement by wounds, with the return of men, injured or otherwise out of action.

About this time appeared a number of memoirs celebrating the virtues of certain young men of remarkable piety and promise who had been cut off early in the campaign. These works, usually somewhat thin volumes, adorned with handsome portraits of the perished heroes (in uniform), drew so exalted a picture of their characters that one would have thought them more fitly enlisted in the Church militant than in the army of the flesh. Some of these youthful Bayards and Havelocks were of such tender age as to be merely drummer-boys; and in all cases one could not but deplore their untimely removal. The representatives of the arts who fell in the earlier battles also had their elegists, and together there was much sorrow in many households.

Attempts to analyze human motives

are usually futile, especially the motives of collective bodies of men. That the New Englander did not leave his farm or his business to redress the wrongs of the negro, need hardly be said; any more than that the British soldier in the present campaign is chiefly actuated by a wish to prevent the ills which may befall native races in South Africa if the rule of his country is overthrown. Probably few abolitionists were in the Northern army. Animosity towards his Southern brother was never a characteristic of the average man in New England, though aroused strongly enough when the national property and its custodians at Charleston were assailed.

He desired

to make money out of him if possible; and he had comparatively few social relations with him, his successive migrations, or emigrations, being towards the West.

Again, military glory was not a factor, for the reason hinted at; he was immersed in business-enterprises with which "grim-visaged war" would have interfered. Nor can the fascination of wearing gilt buttons, as alleged by certain Southern historians, be admitted. Therefore, for these and other reasons, he must be credited with patriotism. He fought for his country, to preserve the Union, his Empire, as his opponent with equally strong purpose fought to bring about its dismemberment, and also, no doubt, for the institution of slavery, upon which to him the stability of his world seemed to rest. All this, however, may be said to apply to the whole North. But, happily for themselves, both sides have long since buried the hatchet, or, what is the same in effect, have joined together in using it upon a foreign adversary. The very phrases, preservation of the Union, right of secession, and so forth, are outworn and forgotten, though the issues were not wholly unlike those now at stake in the British Empire, a racial

problem being involved in the later as in the earlier conflict.

The land of Lowell and Longfellow, of Emerson and of Holmes, Whittier, and Hawthorne, with its bright skies and clear-flowing rivers, its ranges of rock-ribbed hills and mountains, austere of outline and usually clothed with the forests that still approach near to many of its larger towns, was changed in no single feature by the war. No new military works broke the familiar lines of the landscape. Its peaceful, elm-shadowed seats of learning were disturbed by no sieges, bombardments and rude assaults; and no captain, or colonel, or knight in arms, was called on in Miltonic verse to respect the residence or the person of poet or professor. Throughout the land scholastic and academic life, as well as farming and business, pursued their wonted course, and several forms of intellectual activity especially flourished. The vogue of the lecture, for instance, was then at its height and perhaps its best, and other entertainments abounded. Returned soldiers, injured or invalided, and commonly in uniform, were much in evidence; and all kinds of charitable enterprises and organizations connected with the needs of the land and sea forces were at work. Patriotic demonstrations by no means ceased with the first levy of troops. All the chief national holidays were utilized, the Fourth of July lending itself conveniently, though perhaps not logically, to the purpose. That the day which celebrates the political separation of a daughter from a parent state should have been found to have lessons against any further division of the state thus separated, argues an elasticity of function. Possibly it may yet serve as a landmark of international re-union, should that fortunate fate be in store for English-speaking peoples.

One feature notably marked the spirit of the New England people throughout

the four years of fighting,-an unshaken optimism as to the result. I doubt if, from the first, the most timorous person in the six states, if any timorous there were, ever dreamed for a moment of a possible incursion and occupation by a Southern force. Temporary checks they may have expected. Of course, saddened and darkened homes, the eternal blight of war, were many; but losses for the most part were bravely borne. "Not painlessly," sang Whittier,

Not painlessly does God recast
And mould anew the nation.

There were, however, few material hardships; no women and children toiling in the fields perforce; no battlewrecked towns; no burned homesteads and deserted farms or plantations; no blockaded ports; no makeshifts for clothing and articles of common use; no servile race unsettled by the hope of freedom; no starvation. Emerson could be as cheerful and philosophical as ever, Lowell as humorous and caustic, the Autocrat of many breakfast-tables as sprightly, Longfellow as serene. Hawthorne, the dreamer, lately returned from Europe, and perplexed and disillusioned by the calamity which had befallen his land of untrammelled sunshine, had left it for another.

Of course political unanimity did not reign in the extreme Eastern States any more than elsewhere. History, and at least one novel, record the existence in the North of the politically disaffected person. The novel, using the prevailing vernacular, called him a copperhead. The vernacular, however, was wrong; for the reptile so named strikes secretly and silently, while the Southern sympathizer, as I knew him, was, in most cases, a rather outspoken and sometimes noisy person, who vented his opinions on all possible occasions. Probably there were others who did not. In any case, unlike his political counter

A

part in the South, he was in small danger of bodily harm, at least in New England. As a rule, he contented himself with severe criticism of the methods of the government and the leading generals in carrying on the war. parallel might be drawn in connection with current events here, but comparisons are invidious. Moreover, persons of the class, notwithstanding their disaffection, were not infrequently found as volunteers in the Northern army.

But if the inhabitants of the Puritan Peninsula went to war with avidity, so to speak, when it was seen to be unavoidable, they returned to civil pursuits with even more satisfaction. The quiet merging of the great citizen force into the mass of the people, as it is called, has been accounted not less surprising than their original enrolment. But men had grown weary of fighting. In no long time the whole momentous experience—a campaign carried on by hundreds of thousands and spread over half a continent-had slipped into the past. Pictures of war in endless variety they had seen; men marching, voyaging, camping; toiling in trenches, bridging and fording rivers, threading forests and climbing mountains; and fighting everywhere-in woods, in swamps, on mountain-tops. in ships, boats, forts, and farmhouses. It was a phantasmagoria of life and death; but they had seen enough, and, for the most part, were glad to banish the dream. In many cases it seemed to fade without their will. Indeed, numbers of undoubted heroes suffered from a provoking inability to describe their most picturesque experiences, and caused the regret that graphic powers do not necessarily go with soldiership. Others of less authentic valor sometimes supplied the deficiency. Descriptions, however, were not wanting, as vivid and perhaps as convincing as the vaunted methods of the Realist, for the war correspondent had been busy from the first.

The veterans were not the only persons willing and even anxious to forget. Throughout the North, and especially in the cities and towns of New England and other Eastern States, many, after the final submission of the foe, turned as if with a sudden revulsion to other things. They had been patriots while the need lasted, or seemed to last; they had supported and toiled for the Union with the rest, perhaps had used the party watchwords and shibboleths; and had been glad of victory. But victory won, decisively and completely, a distaste for all connected with the war seemed to fall upon them. It had been noble, virtuous, exemplary, the cause of union and freedom; but, after all, it had been a civil war, politically and in the eyes of the world. An English nation fallen out with itself-Marston Moor and Naseby over again after two hundred years-and on Republican soil! It was, doubtless, inevitable, this national re-moulding, a burden shifted upon their shoulders by the more callous, slave-trafficking centuries; but the ordeal once over it were best forgot. They left patriotism, now somewhat staled, and the labors of reconstruction to the politician, and sought brighter fields. Some made money inordinately in the era of commercial activity and speculation that followed peace. Others, whom Roger Ascham might have called "better-feathered spirits," especially the younger ones, found nepenthe and refreshment in literature and art, and in the æsthetic revival of the latter half of the century. A great many rediscovered Europe and its possibilities as an, extended pleasure-ground. Passionate, and other, pilgrimages were made to old-world shrines, and for a space Paris became a Mecca. Mr. Henry James, in particular, discovered England and its upper classes, with their value in the way of affording international episodes. New England itself was discovered by Mr. Howells, who, coming from the

West by way of Venice, found in Boston and its cultivated society, and in the homely people of the outlying country districts, an unworked vein of material for his carefully studied pictures. His refined Harvard heroes, as some will remember, were of a younger generation, addicted to "hopping back and forth over the Atlantic," and little interested in the war their elders had waged, except for its artistic and spectacular effects. In later life they may have had experience of their own in the recent naval and military enterprises of their country.

Macmillan's Magazine.

Perhaps in comparing Old with New England in the momentous question of war, I am forcing slight resemblances. The one, although the only English-founded colony bearing the name of the older state, is now merely the small corner of a nation, while the other is the centre and heart of an empire. Both, however, are to-day as they have always been alike in the readiness of their citizens to go anywhere and do anything in the way of fighting, and both abound in more or less appropriate memorials to those who have fallen on far-distant fields. A. G. Hyde.