th 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.

Before the main body of the regiment marches, we learn that the "