Being determined to reach my company, I boarded a steamer, bound for Morris’ Island, intending, if possible, to avoid the guard.  In this I was foiled.  But after making several futile attempts, I fell in with an officer of the First South Carolina Regiment, who promised to pilot me over.  On reaching the landing, at Cummings Point, I was to follow his lead, as he had a passport, but in going down the gang plank we were met by soldiers with crossed bayonets, demanding “passports.”  The officer, true to his word, passed me over, but then my trouble began.  When I reached the shore I lost my sponsor, and began to make inquiries for my company.  When it was discovered that there was a stranger in the camp without a passport, a corporal of the guards was called, I was placed under arrest, sent to the guardhouse, and remained in durance vile until Captain Walker came to release me.  When I joined my company I found a few of my old school-mates, the others were strangers.  Everything that met my eyes reminded me of war.  Sentinels patrolled the beach; drums beat; soldiers marching and counter-marching; great cannons being drawn along the beach, hundreds of men pulling them by long ropes, or drawn by mule teams.  Across the bay we could see on Sullivan’s Island men and soldiers building and digging out foundations for forts.  Morris’ Island was lined from the lower point to the light house, with batteries of heavy guns.  To the youthful eye of a Southerner, whose mind had been fired by Southern sentiment and literature of the day, by reading the stories of heroes and soldiers in our old “Southern Reader,” of the thrilling romances of Marion and his men, by William Gilmore Simms, this sight of war was enough to dazzle and startle to an enthusiasm that scarcely knew any bounds.  The South were “hero worshipers.”  The stories of Washington and Putnam, of Valley Forge, of Trenton, of Bunker Hill, and Lexington never grew old, while men, women, and children never tired of reading of the storming of Mexico, the siege of Vera Cruz, the daring of the Southern troops at Molino del Rey.

My first duty as a soldier, I will never forget.  I went with a detail to Steven’s Iron Battery to build embrasures for the forts there.  This was done by filling cotton bags the size of 50 pound flour sacks with sand, placing them one upon the top of the other at the opening where the mouths of cannons projected, to prevent the loose earth from falling down and filling in the openings.  The sand was first put upon common wheel-barrows and rolled up single planks in a zig-zag way to the top of the fort, then placed in the sacks and laid in position.  My turn came to use a barrow, while a comrade used the shovel for filling up.  I had never worked a wheel-barrow in my life, and like most of my companions, had done but little work of any kind.  But up I went the narrow zig-zag gangway, with a heavy loaded barrow of loose sand.  I made the first plank all right, and the second, but when I undertook to