When we rendezvoused at the train, we found that the orders were for every man to provide himself three days’ rations in the neighborhood, and be ready for a start at a moment’s notice.

A mountain of bread was already piled up in the station.  I stuck my bayonet through a stout loaf, and, with a dozen comrades armed in the same way, went foraging about for other vivers.

It is a poor part of Philadelphia; but whatever they had in the shops or the houses seemed to be at our disposition.

I stopped at a corner shop to ask for pork, and was amicably assailed by an earnest dame,—­Irish, I am pleased to say.  She thrust her last loaf upon me, and sighed that it was not baked that morning for my “honor’s service.”

A little farther on, two kindly Quaker ladies compelled me to step in.  “What could they do?” they asked eagerly.  “They had no meat in the house; but could we eat eggs?  They had in the house a dozen and a half, new-laid.”  So the pot to the fire, and the eggs boiled, and bagged by myself and that tall Saxon, my friend E., of the Sixth Company.  While the eggs simmered, the two ladies thee-ed us prayerfully and tearfully, hoping that God would save our country from blood, unless blood must be shed to preserve Law and Liberty.

Nothing definite from Baltimore when we returned to the station.  We stood by, waiting orders.  About noon the Eighth Massachusetts Regiment took the train southward.  Our regiment was ready to a man to try its strength with the Plug Uglies.  If there had been any voting on the subject, the plan to follow the straight road to Washington would have been accepted by acclamation.  But the higher powers deemed that “the longest way round was the shortest way home,” and no doubt their decision was wise.  The event proved it.

At two o’clock came the word to “fall in.”  We handled our howitzers again, and marched down Jefferson Avenue to the steamer “Boston” to embark.

To embark for what port?  For Washington, of course, finally; but by what route?  That was to remain in doubt to us privates for a day or two.

The Boston is a steamer of the outside line from Philadelphia to New York.  She just held our legion.  We tramped on board, and were allotted about the craft from the top to the bottom story.  We took tents, traps, and grub on board, and steamed away down the Delaware in the sweet afternoon of April.  If ever the heavens smiled fair weather on any campaign, they have done so on ours.

THE “BOSTON.”

Soldiers on shipboard are proverbially fish out of water.  We could not be called by the good old nickname of “lobsters” by the crew.  Our gray jackets saved the sobriquet.  But we floundered about the crowded vessel like boiling victims in a pot.  At last we found our places, and laid ourselves about the decks to tan or bronze or burn scarlet, according to complexion.  There were plenty of cheeks of lobster-hue before next evening on the Boston.