Of all the vile and damning deeds that ever rendered a city eternally infamous, my boy—of all the infernal sins of dark-browed treachery that ever made open-faced treason seem holy, the crime of Baltimore is the blackest and worst. All that April day we were waiting with bated breath and beating hearts for the devoted men who had pledged their lives to their country at the first call of the President, and were known to be marching to the defence of the nation's capital. That night was one of terror: at any moment the hosts of the rebels might pour upon the city from the mountains of guilty Virginia, and grasp the very throat of the Republic. And with the first dim light of morning came the news that our soldiers had been basely beset in the streets of Baltimore, and ruthlessly shot down by a treacherous mob! Those whom they had trusted as brothers, my boy—whose country they were marching to defend with their lives—assassinating them in cold blood!
I was sitting in my room at Willard's, when a serious chap from New Haven, who had just paused long enough at the door to send a waiter for the same that he had yesterday, came rushing into the apartment with a long, fluttering paper in his hand.
"Listen to this," says he, in wild agitation, and read:
BALTIMORE.
Midnight shadows, dark, appalling, round the Capitol were falling,
And its dome and pillars glimmered spectral from Potomac's shore;
All the great had gone to slumber, and of all the busy number
That had moved the State by day within its walls, as erst before,
None there were but dreamed of heroes thither sent ere day was o'er—
Thither sent through Baltimore.