28 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



irate drummer. I could not have been more than four years old 

 at the time, yet the delight of that deed stays by me. 



When I was about five, the musterings for the Mexican War 

 were going on, and the barracks were over-filled, so that con- 

 siderable hordes of troops were encamped in the open fields 

 which adjoined it. On those fields, then pastures, one of the 

 horse batteries, I believe Ringgold's, was for some time drilled. 

 I was then exempt from the care of a nurse and could run about 

 afoot or on a pony. The movements of this command filled my 

 little soul with wonder; there I gained my first sense of the 

 power of men in action, that primitive might of war which 

 impresses the primitive child and childish man as nothing else 

 does. I well remember my longing for the unapproachable 

 splendor of the commander of that battery, who seemed to me 

 a supernatural being. Oddly enough, fifteen years thereafter I 

 was in his place drilling a horse battery on the same field, to 

 find it tedious drudgery, with moments of high life when by 

 chance the work went well. 



The newspaper reports of the battles in Mexico read aloud by 

 my mother to the household made a great and enlarging im- 

 pression on me. Though I could not read, I had the ability to 

 understand a map, and I made a poor stagger at a description 

 of the country over which the troops passed on their way to 

 Mexico and of their movements in that country. As I had seen 

 many of the officers and sundry of the commands on their way 

 to the front, I had food for imagination, and of it I built a host 

 of pictures of imaginary events. For two or three years about 

 all the thoughts of my waking hours and all my dreams were 

 of war or fighting of some kind. The interest was aroused at an 

 even earlier time, for I remember my eagerness on court days to 

 see from near by the brutal contests between the tipsy country- 

 men in the Court-House yard. So too, I recall, when about five 

 years old, being in the midst of a riot on a race-track half a mile 

 from my home people in the judge's stand shooting down at 

 a mob which was assailing them. While in the delight of the 



