Good Soldiers for Scaling Walls.
Among our regiments is the Missouri First, Colonel Frank P. Blair. Three companies are made up of German Turners—the most accomplished of gymnasts. They are sinewy, muscular fellows, with deep chests and well-knit frames. Every man is an athlete. To-day a party, by way of exercise, suddenly formed a human pyramid, and commenced running up, like squirrels, over each other's shoulders, to the high veranda upon the second story of their building. In climbing a wall, they would not require scaling-ladders. There are also two companies from the Far West—old trappers and hunters, who have smelt gunpowder in Indian warfare.
Colonel Blair's dry, epigrammatic humor bewilders some of his visitors. I was sitting in his head-quarters when a St. Louis Secessionist entered. Like nearly all of them, he now pretends to be a Union man, but is very tender on the subject of State Rights, and wonderfully solicitous about the Constitution. He remarked:
"I am a Union man, but I believe in State Rights. I believe a State may dissolve its connection with the Government if it wants to."
"O yes," replied Blair, pulling away at his ugly mustache, "yes, you can go out if you want to. Certainly you can secede. But, my friend, you can't take with you one foot of American soil!"
Missouri and the Slaveholders.
A citizen of Lexington introduced himself, saying:
"I am a loyal man, ready to fight for the Union; but I am pro-slavery—I own niggers."
"Well, sir," replied Blair, with the faintest suggestion of a smile on his plain, grim face, "you have a right to. We don't like negroes very much ourselves. If you do, that's a matter of taste. It is one of your privileges. But if you gentlemen who own negroes attempt to take the State of Missouri out of the Union, in about six months you will be the most ---- niggerless set of individuals that you ever heard of!"