different hotel, to dinner. This became one of the ceremonies of our barrack-life. We liked it. The Washingtonians were amused and encouraged by it. Three times a day, with marked punctuality, our lines formed and tramped down the hill to scuffle with awkward squads of waiters for fare more or less tolerable. In these little marches we encountered by and by the other regiments, and, most soldierly of all, the Rhode Island men, in blue flannel blouses and bersaglière hats. But of them hereafter.
It was a most attractive post of ours at the Capitol. Spring was at its freshest and fairest. Every day was more exquisite than its fore-runner. We drilled morning, noon, and evening, almost hourly, in the pretty square east of the building. Old soldiers found that they rattled through the manual twice as alert as ever before. Recruits became old soldiers in a trice. And as to awkward squads, men that would have been the veriest louts and lubbers in the piping times of peace now learned to toe the mark, to whisk their eyes right and their eyes left, to drop the buts of their muskets without crushing their corns, and all the mysteries of flank and file, — and so became full-fledged heroes before they knew it.
In the rests between our drills we lay under the young shade on the sweet young grass, with the odors of snowballs and horse-chestnut blooms drifting to us with every whiff of breeze, and amused ourselves with watching the evolutions of our friends of the Massachusetts Eighth, and other less
