As you encouraged them to volunteer, so you followed them in your thoughts all through their soldier lives, and when they came home you received them with outstretched arms and open hearts. Your suspense as to what might happen, your anxiety when news came that a battle had been fought, your agony when some one near to you had fallen, so intensified your devotion to those in whom you had an interest that when they did get home, you looked upon them as great bulwarks behind which you and your country had found safety. And when they won your hearts and offered you their hands, you knew that they would be as true and faithful and devoted to you as they had been to their country.

A brave man makes a tender-hearted citizen, husband, and father. He who has charged up to the very cannon's mouth would never be cruel to wife or child.

"The bravest are the tenderest,

The loving are the daring."

That these husbands and fathers are members of the Loyal Legion, is an unqualified assurance that during their career in the army, and a quarter of a century in civil life, their acts and character and reputation have been able to stand the closest scrutiny. That record entitles them to wear the little rosette which is recognized and respected all over the civilized world; and, travel as they may, they are almost certain to meet through that rosette, companions. No introduction is needed. There is a common tie forged by bloody war.

It is a general belief that men never amount to much if they do not in their youth sow an abundant crop of wild oats. These men sowed theirs on the tented field, on hard marches, and on fields of battle. They came home to be as good citizens as they were good soldiers. With few exceptions, they obeyed God's mandate that man should not live alone. Amid discomforts, dangers, and sufferings, they had pictured in their minds a thou

sand times, a wife, a little home, a fireside. No one can appreciate these blessings until they have been beyond his reach.

He who has lived out of doors, has marched tired and foot-sore, has slept on the hard cold ground, has been chilled to the very bone, has endured hunger and thirst, has been sick and wounded, has had nightly visions of mother, of wife, of sweetheart, can and has and does appreciate to the fullest extent a roof, a fireside, a bountiful table, a bed of down, a loving wife and prattling children, a home! God's earthly paradise, a Home!

OUR BOYS IN THE WAR.

BY JOHN C. BLACK.

[Read June 9, 1892.]

N a recent occasion I said, speaking of the men who entered the service: "They who first went forth to battle were the young, dedicated with more than Jewish fervor to the cause of the country; and after them went the stalwart fathers, whose hearts yearned for their brave boys in the field, and yet agonized for wife and children. I know of no sublimer character than the American Husband and Father of 1861-65, turning from the quiet and plenty his own industry had gathered, the home which was filled with the rewards of his toil, the summer of woman's love, and the prattle of baby voices; away from the city, the village street, or the fragrant solitude of the farm; away from the sanctity of domestic joy,- to the roar of camps and the whirlwind of war; standing in battle. by his veteran son; folding him, wounded, in his arms, father's and comrade's at once; laying him down among the slain, when the horrible day was done, to rest in the long trenches under the stars and the flag, still and glorious forever; then, while the man within him cried for his mate far away, and the young hero gone, to turn to steel in the presence of duty, and solemnly, as became a man, renew the onward march to triumph, and perchance to death! No hireling service this; no substitute work for bounty, doled by the coward to the venal; no Hessian greed that matched blood against gold, — but manhood's work, sweet and becoming, for the land of his love. This is the greatest character, the American Husband and Father turned to the volunteer. Compared

with this, all others in our history are colorless and uninteresting. And as time goes on, our admiration will increase and broaden, it will take on tenderer tones, and he will appear more and more majestic. The final typical group of the war has not yet been fixed in marble or bronze. When it shall be, we will have this figure I have sketched in the hour of his parting, while around him will stand the beloved of his life, urging yet withholding, and, over all, the solemn genius of home and country pointing onward to where the flag waves in the thunderstorms of war."

And of the truth of this statement I become more thoroughly convinced year by year as my own life shows, in its ripening relations, the awful burden laid upon the Man of Family who became a volunteer. I did not appreciate the situation while in the service, for many

reasons.

I was myself a young man of twenty-two years; my brother, who served with me, was about eighteen. The company in which I enlisted in the Eleventh Indiana regiment, for the three months' service, consisted, among others, of thirty-three college boys from all the classes. below senior, who had been, in the main, members of the College Cadets. The company I afterwards enlisted for the Thirty-seventh Illinois regiment, excluding perhaps eight or ten of its numbers, would hardly have averaged nineteen years; and the regiment itself, recruited in various parts of the State, in July, August, and September of 1861, would scarcely have raised that average to twenty-two years.

We had perhaps better dispose of some statistical matters at this point. There have been records examined, as to age, of 1,012,273 of the 2,750,000 enlistments in the Union Army, - about two-fifths of the whole number; and the doctrine of average will apply to all when such large numbers are involved. In other words, that which is true of two-fifths is practically true of five-fifths.