“Remember that, although these flags are now yours, they still remain ours.  Your cause is ours.  Your vows our vows.  Your loyalty to God and country is part of our loyalty to God, to country, and to you.”

She stood silent, pensive a moment; then stretched out her arms, a flag in either hand; and the Colonel rode straight up to where she stood, took the silken colours and handed them to the two colour-sergeants.  Then, while an orderly advanced to the head of his horse, Colonel Craig dismounted and quietly ascended the steps beside the little group of ladies and city officials: 

“On behalf of the officers and men of the 3rd New York Zouaves,” he said, “I thank you.  We are grateful.  I think that we all mean to do our best.

“If we cannot, in the hour of trial, do all that is expected of us, we will do all that is in us to do.

“It is very easy to dress a thousand men in uniform, and invest them with the surroundings of military life; but it is not thus alone that soldiers are made.  It is only discipline; regular steady, rigid discipline—­that forms a soldier to be relied upon in the hour of need.

“At present we are only recruits.  So I ask, in justice to the regiment, that you will not demand too much of us in the beginning.  We desire to learn; we desire most earnestly to deserve your confidence.  I can only say that we will try to prove ourselves not unworthy guardians of these flags you have given us.”

He bowed, turned to go, swung around sharply and looked at his wife.

“Good-bye, my darling,” he said under his breath; and the nest moment he was in the saddle.

All the rest that Ailsa recollected distinctly was the deafening outcrash of military music, the sustained cheering, the clatter of hoofs, the moving column of red and gold—­and Celia, standing there under the July sun, her daughters’ hands in hers.

So the 3rd Zouaves marched gaily away under their new silk flags to their transport at Pier No. 3, North River.  But the next day another regiment received its colours and went, and every day or so more regiments departed with their brand-new colours; and after a little only friends and relatives remembered the 3rd Zouaves, and what was their colonel’s name.

By the middle of July the transformation of the metropolis from a city into a vast military carnival was complete.  Gaudy uniforms were no longer the exception; a madness for fantastic brilliancy seized the people; soldiers in all kinds of colours and all kinds of dress filled the streets.  Hotels, shops, ferry-boats, stages, cars, swarmed with undisciplined troops of all arms of the service, clad in every sort of extravagant uniforms.  Except for the more severe state uniform and the rarer uniform of National troops, eccentric costumes were the rule.  It was a carnival of military absurdity.  Regiments were continually entering the city, regiments were continually leaving