rious fever. By
the time he recovered, the new regiment had been organized and new
officers put over it. Of course, his men were dissatisfied. With the
understanding that such of his old comrades as wished could join it,
he went to work immediately recruiting another company. But nearly all
his old men wanted to come into it, the new men recruited would
not give him up, and the anomalous position arose of two companies
clamoring for one captain. While it created much comment, it did not
lessen the jealousy which his popularity had aroused, among men and
officers not intimately associated with him, so that his second
enlistment began under a cloud of disappointment for his men, and
jealousy among outsiders, that seemed to bring misfortune in its
train.

His new men, however, never failed him. His thoughtful care for them,
his kindness, his unselfishness won their loyalty and love as it had
done in Company F, and Company D, 2nd Massachusetts Volunteers were to
a man as devoted and as attached to him as ever were his old comrades
of the first days of the war.

In this company went as Captain Conwell's personal orderly, a young
boy, John Ring, of Westfield, Massachusetts, a lad of sixteen or
seventeen. Entirely too young and too small to join the ranks of
soldiers, he had pleaded with his father so earnestly to be permitted
to go to the war that Mr. Ring had finally consented to put him in
Captain Conwell's charge. The boy was a worshipper at the shrine of
the young Captain. He had sat thrilled and fascinated under the magic
of the burning words which had swept men by the hundreds to enlist. It
was Captain Conwell's speeches that had stirred the boy and moved him
with such fiery ardor to go to war. No greater joy could be given him,
since he could not fight, than to be in his Captain's very tent to
look after his belongings, to minister in small ways to his comfort. A
hero worshipper the lad was, and at an age when ideals take hold of a
pure, high-minded boy with a force that will carry him to any height
of self-sacrifice, to any depth of suffering. He had been carefully
reared in a Christian home and read the Bible every morning and every
evening in their tent, a sight that so pricked the conscience
of Captain Conwell, as he remembered his mother and her loving
instructions, that he forbade it. But though John Ring loved Captain
Conwell with a love which the former did not then understand, the boy
loved duty and right b