the men out on the streets and to vacant lots near by, exercising them in marching drill. Through the influence of Governor Sprague the company was furnished with a complete battery of twelve pounder James guns, which arrived here some time in May, I think, and then the drills became spirited in exercise in the manual of the piece, mechanical maneuvres, as well as in marching.

About the first of June Lieutenant William H. Reynolds and First Sergeant Thomas F. Vaughn of the three months battery, were appointed Captain and First Lieutenant respectively, and J. Albert Monroe, John A. Tompkins and William B. Weeden were appointed Second, Third and Fourth Lieutenants, and they were so commissioned. The commissions should have been one captain, two first lieutenants and two second lieutenants, but there was so little knowledge of just the right way to do things at that time, that this error occurred, and it was not until after the First Battle of Bull Run that it was corrected.

On the sixth of June, 1861, the company was mustered into the United States service by Colonel S. Loomis of the United States Army, for the period of “three years unless sooner discharged,” in a large room of a building on Eddy street.

On the eighth of June, the regular business of soldier’s life began by the company going into camp on Dexter Training Ground. The time was occupied in detachment and battery drills until the nineteenth of the month, when the guns, carriages, and the horses also, if my memory serves me, were embarked on the steamer Kill-von-Kull, at the Fox Point wharf. The steamer landed at Elizabethport, New Jersey, where the battery and men were transferred to cars. The train left Elizabethport about four o’clock in the afternoon. The journey to Washington was a most tedious one. Harrisburg was not reached until the next morning, and it was not until the following morning that the train arrived in Washington.

Although the journey was a long one, and tiresome, many incidents transpired to relieve the tedium of the trip. At Baltimore, which was passed through in the evening, every man was on the qui vive, with nerves strung to the tension, so great was the fear that an attack might be made upon us. Every one who had a revolver carried it cocked. A corporal, who is now a commissioned officer in the regular army, remarked to me that he never was in such danger in his life, though nothing had occurred to awaken a sense of danger, except that a small pebble was thrown, probably by some boys, that hit one of the gun carriages on the flat car, upon which he and I were riding. The next day rebel flags, in imagination, were frequently discovered while passing through Maryland.

On our arrival at Washington, the morning of the twenty-second, we were cordially greeted by Captain Tompkins of the three months battery, and he and his men lent us every assistance in their power. The company went into camp in Gale’s woods, with the Second Regiment Rhode Island Infantry, and adjoining were the camps of the three months organizations—the First Regiment Rhode Island Detached Militia and the First Battery. The ground occupied by the three months men was already known as “Camp Sprague;” the ground occupied by the Second Battery and the Second Regiment was named “Camp Clark,” in honor of Bishop Thomas M. Clark, who had taken a great interest in the raising and the organization of troops in Rhode Island.

Affairs went along more smoothly than could reasonably have been expected from men just taken from the pursuits of civil life. Captain Reynolds, with rare tact, won the confidence of all his men and officers. Section and battery drills took place daily, in the morning, and the afternoons were generally spent at standing gun drill.

On the ninth of