strictures throughout the Diary concerning the over-use of intoxicants were written from this standpoint, and perhaps were over stated. At least truth requires that I should at this distance testify that the bulk of the Union Army, so largely made up of boys, was of stern stuff, with their lives rooted in seriousness and committed to sobriety, as the subsequent careers of those who were allowed to return amply prove. Many things set forth in this Diary were necessarily untrue to fact, but there is nothing but what was true to the thought and feeling of the writer at the time. The simplicity of the narrative and the lapse of time, will, I hope, take all the barbs out of any random shafts that may have been fired by a battery boy.

The monotonous story of this battery boy is told in long metre in the Diary here published. The only remarkable thing about the record is, that it exists and is still available fifty years after the writing. Of course every soldier lad started to keep a diary. Very few persisted to the end; rare is the private who did not outlast his own diary. And then again, the vicissitudes of the camp, the hopeless carelessness of the American people to contemporary history, have carried to oblivion most of such records. These ten little memorandum books would doubtless have suffered a like fate, were it not for the vigilance of the home folk, to whose care the successive volumes were promptly consigned. And then many years after, there was the loving, unsolicited persistency of a faithful amanuensis, who, unbeknown to me, in the "cracks of time," patiently and faithfully transcribed the entire story, which was fast becoming illegible in the original camp- and battle-stained little books, to the clear, typewritten sheets which made them available to the Wisconsin History Commission. To Miss Minnie Burroughs, now Mrs. Herbert Turner of Berkeley, California, belongs therefore the basic credit for this publication.

Further acknowledgment is due to the Editor of the Commission, and to several of his able assistants on the editorial staff of the Wisconsin Historical Society. They have with great painstaking verified every word of the transcription with my original gnarled manuscript, have corrected (so far as possible by the official rolls) the names of the persons whom I have mentioned in the Diary, have read the proof, and in general have put the book through the press. This has involved an amount of labor which under the circumstances I could not have given, and without which the publication would have been inexcusable. It is the Editor's intelligent hand also that furnished most of the geographical date-lines, the paragraphing, the folio headings, the sub-heads, and the countless other editorial embellishments so essential to a presentable publication. * * * Technical work of this sort is entirely lost on the reader, of course, but it is profoundly appreciated by at least the present grateful author.

The post-bellum story of this journalizing private of the 6th Wisconsin Battery does not belong in this book. Should anyone be curious to connect the soldier in uniform with the militant citizen, who, with more pacific weapons, has continued his contentions for freedom, justice, and union, let the following suffice. There was a year's work on the new farm in Iowa County; then a winter of teaching the common school at Arena, Wisconsin, with ninety children, ranging from the little German child grappling with her English A. B. C.'s, to students in algebra and geometry. During one year there was an honest attempt to accept the path apparently laid out for me—that of an honest, hard-working farmer. And then the hunger for books, the blind push on thought lines, the half-unrecognized leadings towards another career, broke beyond control, and I left the farm. Then came four years' study at the Theological Seminary at Meadville, Pennsylvania; a pastorate of a year at