coming probabilities, and I spoke of the doubt so widely existing as to the loyalty of the people.  He rejoined, earnestly,—­“I can only speak for myself.  You know I have a great work to do, to which my life is pledged; I am the only earthly stay of my parents; there is a young woman whose happiness I regard as dearer than my own:  yet I could ask no better death than to fall next week before Sumter.  I am not better than other men.  You will find that patriotism is not dead, even if it sleeps.”

Sumter fell, and the sleeping awoke.  The spirit of Ellsworth, cramped by a few weeks’ intercourse with politicians, sprang up full-statured in the Northern gale.  He cut at once the meshes of red tape that had hampered and held him, threw up his commission, and started for New York without orders, without assistance, without authority, but with the consciousness that the President would sustain him.  The rest the world knows.  I will be brief in recalling it.

In an incredibly short space of time he enlisted and organized a regiment, eleven hundred strong, of the best fighting material that ever went to war.  He divided it, according to an idea of his own, into groups of four comrades each, for the campaign.  He exercised a personal supervision over the most important and the most trivial minutiae of the regimental business.  The quick sympathy of the public still followed him.  He became the idol of the Bowery and the pet of the Avenue.  Yet not one instant did he waste in recreation or lionizing.  Indulgent to all others, he was merciless to himself.  He worked day and night, like an incarnation of Energy.  When he arrived with his men in Washington, he was thin, hoarse, flushed, but entirely contented and happy, because busy and useful.

Of the bright enthusiasm and the quenchless industry of the next few weeks what need to speak?  Every day, by his unceasing toil and care, by his vigor, alertness, activity, by his generosity, and by his relentless rigor when duty commanded, he grew into the hearts of his robust and manly followers, until every man in the regiment feared him as a Colonel should be feared, and loved him as a brother should be loved.

On the night of the twenty-third of May, he called his men together, and made a brief, stirring speech to them, announcing their orders to advance on Alexandria.  “Now, boys, go to bed, and wake up at two o’clock for a sail and a skirmish.”  When the camp was silent, he began to work.  He wrote many hours, arranging the business of the regiment.  He finished his labor as the midnight stars were crossing the zenith.  As he sat in his tent by the shore, it seems as if the mystical gales from the near eternity must have breathed for a moment over his soul, freighted with the odor of amaranths and asphodels.  For he wrote two strange letters:  one to her who mourns him faithful in death; one to his parents.  There is nothing braver or more pathetic.  With the prophetic instinct of love, he assumed the office of consoler for the stroke that impended.