en I ever knew;
but he repudiated that note without hesitation, because I was a rebel,
and the son of a man who had owned slaves.

In that summer--of 1861--the first wash of the wave of war broke upon
the shores of Missouri. Our State was invaded by the Union forces. They
took possession of St. Louis, Jefferson Barracks, and some other points.
The Governor, Claib Jackson, issued his proclamation calling out fifty
thousand militia to repel the invader.

I was visiting in the small town where my boyhood had been
spent--Hannibal, Marion County. Several of us got together in a secret
place by night and formed ourselves into a military company. One Tom
Lyman, a young fellow of a good deal of spirit but of no military
experience, was made captain; I was made second lieutenant. We had no
first lieutenant; I do not know why; it was long ago. There were fifteen
of us. By the advice of an innocent connected with the organisation,
we called ourselves the Marion Rangers. I do not remember that any one
found fault with the name. I did not; I thought it sounded quite well.
The young fellow who proposed this title was perhaps a fair sample of
the kind of stuff we were made of. He was young, ignorant, good-natured,
well-meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric
novels and singing forlorn love-ditties. He had some pathetic little
nickel-plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which was
Dunlap; detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in that
region as Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his
ear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d'Unlap. That
contented his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the
new name the same old pronunciation--emphasis on the front end of it.
He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined--a thing to make one
shiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and
affectations; he began to write his name so: d'Un Lap. And he waited
patiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at this work
of art, and he had his reward at last; for he lived to see that name
accepted, and the emphasis put where he wanted it, by people who had
known him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been
as familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure of
victory at last is the courage that can wait. He said he had found, by
consulting some ancient French chronicles, that the name was