After a patient hour of this, the word is given, we fall in, our two
guns find their places at the right of the line of march, we move on
through the thickening crowd.
At a great house on the left, as we pass the Astor Library, I see a
handkerchief waving for me. Yes! it is she who made the sandwiches in my
knapsack. They were a trifle too thick, as I afterwards discovered,
but otherwise perfection. Be these my thanks and the thanks of hungry
comrades who had bites of them!
At the corner of Great Jones Street we halted for half an hour,--then,
everything ready, we marched down Broadway.
It was worth a life, that march. Only one who passed, as we did, through
that tempest of cheers, two miles long, can know the terrible
enthusiasm of the occasion. I could hardly hear the rattle of our own
gun-carriages, and only once or twice the music of our band came to me
muffled and quelled by the uproar. We knew now, if we had not before
divined it, that our great city was with us as one man, utterly united
in the great cause we were marching to sustain.
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