He drilled these young men for about a year at short intervals.  His discipline was very severe and rigid.  Added to the punctilio of the martinet was the rigor of the moralist.  The slightest exhibition of intemperance or licentiousness was punished by instant degradation and expulsion.  He struck from the rolls at one time twelve of his best men for breaking the rule of total abstinence.  His moral power over them was perfect and absolute.  I believe anyone of them would have died for him.

In two or three principal towns of Illinois and Wisconsin he drilled other companies:  in Springfield, where he made the friends who best appreciated what was best in him; and in Rockford, where he formed an attachment which imparted a coloring of tender romance to all the days of his busy life that remained.  This tragedy would not have been perfect without the plaintive minor strain of Love in Death.

His company took the Premium Colors at the United States Agricultural Pair, and Ellsworth thought it was time to show to the people some fruit of his drill.  They issued their soldierly defi and started on their Marche de Triomphe.  It is useless to recall to those who read newspapers the clustering glories of that bloodless campaign.  Hardly had they left the suburbs of Chicago when the murmur of applause began.  New York, secure in the championship of half a century, listened with quiet metropolitan scorn to the noise of the shouting provinces; but when the crimson phantasms marched out of the Park, on the evening of the 15th of July, New York, with metropolitan magnanimity, confessed herself utterly vanquished by the good thing that had come out of Nazareth.  There was no resisting the Zouaves.  As the erring Knight of the Round Table said,—­

  “men went down before his spear at a touch,
  But knowing he was Lancelot; his great name conquered.”

There were one or two Southern companies that issued insulting defiances, but, after a little expenditure of epistolary valor, prudently, though ingloriously, stayed afar,—­as is usual in New Gascony.  With these exceptions, the heart of the nation went warmly out to these young men.  Their endurance, their discipline, their alertness, their elan, surprised the sleepy drill-masters out of their propriety, and waked up the people to intense and cordial admiration.  Chicago welcomed them home proudly, covered with tan and dust and glory.

Ellsworth found himself for his brief hour the most talked-of man in the country.  His pictures sold like wildfire in every city of the land.  School-girls dreamed over the graceful wave of his curls, and shop-boys tried to reproduce the Grand Seigneur air of his attitude.  Zouave corps, brilliant in crimson and gold, sprang up, phosphorescently, in his wake, making bright the track of his journey.  The leading journals spoke editorially of him, and the comic papers caricatured his drill.