Thus the days passed away, and as the term of enlistment drew to a close, General Foster sent for Captain Conwell and promised to recommend him for a colonelcy if he would enter at once upon recruiting service among his men.  This he willingly consented to do, and as may be imagined his men nearly all wanted to re-enlist under him.  Such a commission, however, for one so young aroused bitter jealousy among officers of other companies, and Captain Conwell hearing of it, decided not to accept the appointment.  He wrote the Governor that he would be content with the captain’s commission again and that he preferred not to raise contention by receiving anything higher.  The company returned home, but before the new re-organization was effected, Captain Conwell was attacked with a serious fever.  By the time he recovered, the new regiment had been organized and new officers put over it.  Of course, his men were dissatisfied.  With the understanding that such of his old comrades as wished could join it, he went to work immediately recruiting another company.  But nearly all his old men wanted to come into it, the new men recruited would not give him up, and the anomalous position arose of two companies clamoring for one captain.  While it created much comment, it did not lessen the jealousy which his popularity had aroused, among men and officers not intimately associated with him, so that his second enlistment began under a cloud of disappointment for his men, and jealousy among outsiders, that seemed to bring misfortune in its train.

His new men, however, never failed him.  His thoughtful care for them, his kindness, his unselfishness won their loyalty and love as it had done in Company F, and Company D, 2nd Massachusetts Volunteers were to a man as devoted and as attached to him as ever were his old comrades of the first days of the war.

In this company went as Captain Conwell’s personal orderly, a young boy, John Ring, of Westfield, Massachusetts, a lad of sixteen or seventeen.  Entirely too young and too small to join the ranks of soldiers, he had pleaded with his father so earnestly to be permitted to go to the war that Mr. Ring had finally consented to put him in Captain Conwell’s charge.  The boy was a worshipper at the shrine of the young Captain.  He had sat thrilled and fascinated under the magic of the burning words which had swept men by the hundreds to enlist.  It was Captain Conwell’s speeches that had stirred the boy and moved him with such fiery ardor to go to war.  No greater joy could be given him, since he could not fight, than to be in his Captain’s very tent to look after his belongings, to minister in small ways to his comfort.  A hero worshipper the lad was, and at an age when ideals take hold of a pure, high-minded boy with a force that will carry him to any height of self-sacrifice, to any depth of suffering.  He had been carefully reared in a Christian home and read the Bible every morning and every evening in their tent, a sight that so pricked the conscience of Captain Conwell, as he remembered his mother and her loving instructions, that he forbade it.  But though John Ring loved Captain Conwell with a love which the former did not then understand, the boy loved duty and right better, and bravely disobeying these orders, he read on.