The old rattletrap was an old friend.  Charles Homans had had a share in building it.  The machine and the man said, “How d’y’ do?” at once.  Homans called for a gang of engine-builders.  Of course they swarmed out of the ranks.  They passed their hands over the locomotive a few times, and presently it was ready to whistle and wheeze and rumble and gallop, as if no traitor had ever tried to steal the go and the music out of it.

This had all been done during the afternoon of the 23d.  During the night, the renovated engine was kept cruising up and down the track to see all clear.  Guards of the Eighth were also posted to protect passage.

Our commander had, I presume, been cooperating with General Butler in this business.  The Naval Academy authorities had given us every despatch and assistance, and the middies, frank, personal hospitality.  The day was halcyon, the grass was green and soft, the apple-trees were just in blossom:  it was a day to be remembered.

Many of us will remember it, and show the marks of it for months, as the day we had our heads cropped.  By evening there was hardly one poll in the Seventh tenable by anybody’s grip.  Most sat in the shade and were shorn by a barber.  A few were honored with a clip by the artist hand of the petit caporal of our Engineer Company.

While I rattle off these trifling details, let me not fail to call attention to the grave service done by our regiment, by its arrival, at the nick of time, at Annapolis.  No clearer special Providence could have happened.  The country-people of the traitor sort were aroused.  Baltimore and its mob were but two hours away.  The Constitution had been hauled out of reach of a rush by the Massachusetts men,—­first on the ground,—­but was half-manned and not fully secure.  And there lay the Maryland, helpless on the shoal, with six or seven hundred souls on board, so near the shore that the late Captain Rynders’s gun could have sunk her from some ambush.

Yes! the Seventh Regiment at Annapolis was the Right Man in the Right Place!

OUR MORNING MARCH.

Reveille.  As nobody pronounces this word a la francaise, as everybody calls it “Revelee,” why not drop it, as an affectation, and translate it the “Stir your Stumps,” the “Peel your Eyes,” the “Tumble Up,” or literally the “Wake”?

Our snorers had kept up this call so lustily since midnight, that, when the drums sounded it, we were all ready.

The Sixth and Second Companies, under Captain Nevers, are detached to lead the van.  I see my brother Billy march off with the Sixth, into the dusk, half-moonlight, half-dawn, and hope that no beggar of a Secessionist will get a pat shot at him, by the roadside, without his getting a chance to let fly in return.  Such little possibilities intensify the earnest detestation we feel for the treasons we come to resist and to punish.  There will be some bitter work done, if we ever get to blows in this war,—­this needless, reckless, brutal assault upon the mildest of all governments.