_Mustered Out at Arlington Heights--Back to the Old Bay
State--Discharged From the Service--Startling News in a Quiet
Village--Home, Sweet Home._
[Illustration: 9228]
ERE at Arlington Heights the squadron of the First Massachusetts
Cavalry, Companies C and D, commanded by Capt. E. A. Flint, and on duty
at headquarters Army of the Potomac, was mustered out June 29, 1865,
by Capt. J. C. Bates, of the Eleventh United States infantry, chief
commissary of musters, in compliance with special orders No. 24
headquarters cavalry corps, June 18, 1865. A few days later we were
en route to the Old Bay State to receive our discharges at Camp Meigs,
Readville. Many of the boys were so anxious to get home that they could
not wait to have their papers made out, but left requests to have them
sent on to them by mail.
I reached home a day or two after the Fourth of July. And what a reunion
we had! All the family and many of the neighbors assembled to welcome
the soldier boy. Of course I was a hero in the estimation of the good
folks at home. I had yet seven months to live to reach my seventeenth
birthday, but I had returned with a discharge which declared that “No
objection to his being re-enlisted is known to exist.”
In a marginal note it was stated that “This sentence will be erased
should there be anything in the conduct or physical condition of the
soldier rendering him unfit for the army.”
Irving Waterman did not reach Berlin until two days after my arrival. He
had remained at Boston to visit with one of the boys. My little sister
Eva, when she saw me coming down the road without Irving, only waited
to greet me with a kiss, and then started on a run for the home of
Waterman's parents.
“My brother's come home!” she exclaimed.
“Praise the Lord!” shouted Mrs. Waterman.
“But your son didn't come.”
“Didn't he--what's the matter?”
“He's dead.”
“Dead? Irving dead--no, no! that can't be.”
“But he didn't come, and he must be dead.”
Mrs. Waterman headed a procession--a dozen or more--of men, women and
children, who came up the street on a run. The news that Waterman was
dead spread like wildfire, and soon a large number of villager's were
at our house to hear all about it. Their alarm was changed to rejoicing
when I assured them that Waterman was alive and well.
My little sister when she heard mother inquiring about Irving, and my
reply that he had not returned with me, took it for granted that he was
dead, and so hastened to inform Mrs. Waterman.
Late that night when the family separated to “catch a little sleep
before chore time,” as father put it, and I sank down into mother's best
feather bed, and tried to remember the thrilling events in which I had
participated since Waterman, Taylor and I started for that “shooting
match,” I felt that, after all,--
“Be it ever so humble,
There's no place like home.”
[Illustration: 0234]
End of Project Gutenberg's A Boy Trooper With Sheridan, by Stanton P. Allen