In the rests between our drills we lay under the young shade on the sweet young grass, with the odors of snowballs and horse-chestnut blooms drifting to us with every whiff of breeze, and amused ourselves with watching the evolutions of our friends of the Massachusetts Eighth, and other less experienced soldiers, as they appeared upon the field.  They, too, like ourselves, were going through the transformations.  These sturdy fellows were then in a rough enough chrysalis of uniform.  That shed, they would look worthy of themselves.

But the best of the entertainment was within the Capitol.  Some three thousand or more of us were now quartered there.  The Massachusetts Eighth were under the dome.  No fear of want of air for them.  The Massachusetts Sixth were eloquent for their State in the Senate Chamber.  It was singularly fitting, among the many coincidences in the history of this regiment, that they should be there, tacitly avenging the assault upon Sumner and the attempts to bully the impregnable Wilson.

In the recesses, caves, and crypts of the Capitol what other legions were bestowed I do not know.  I daily lost myself, and sometimes when out of my reckoning was put on the way by sentries of strange corps, a Reading Light Infantry man, or some other.  We all fraternized.  There was a fine enthusiasm among us:  not the soldierly rivalry in discipline that may grow up in future between men of different States acting together, but the brotherhood of ardent fellows first in the field and earnest in the cause.

All our life in the Capitol was most dramatic and sensational.

Before it was fairly light in the dim interior of the Representatives Chamber, the reveilles of the different regiments came rattling through the corridors.  Every snorer’s trumpet suddenly paused.  The impressive sound of the hushed breathing of a thousand sleepers, marking off the fleet moments of the night, gave way to a most vociferous uproar.  The boy element is large in the Seventh Regiment.  Its slang dictionary is peculiar and unabridged.  As soon as we woke, the pit began to chaff the galleries, and the galleries the pit.  We were allowed noise nearly ad libitum.  Our riotous tendencies, if they existed, escaped by the safety-valve of the larynx.  We joked, we shouted, we sang, we mounted the Speaker’s desk and made speeches,—­always to the point; for if any but a wit ventured to give tongue, he was coughed down without ceremony.  Let the M.C.s adopt this plan and silence their dunces.

With all our jollity we preserved very tolerable decorum.  The regiment is assez bien compose.  Many of its privates are distinctly gentlemen of breeding and character.  The tone is mainly good, and the esprit de corps high.  If the Colonel should say, “Up, boys, and at ’em!” I know that the Seventh would do brilliantly in the field.  I speak now of its behavior in-doors.  This certainly did it credit.  Our thousand did the Capitol little harm that a corporal’s guard of Biddies with mops and tubs could not repair in a forenoon’s campaign.