It lodged at the Astor House
to leave at nine in the morning. Long before that hour the building
was flanked and fronted with tens of thousands, crowding
Broadway for three blocks, stuffing the wide mouth of Park Row
and braced into Vesey and Barday Streets. My editor assigned me
to this interesting event. I stood in the crowd, that morning, and
saw what was really the beginning of the war in New York. There
was no babble of voices, no impatient call, no sound of idle jeering
such as one is apt to hear in a waiting crowd. It stood silent, each
man busy with the rising current of his own emotions, solemnified
by the faces all around him. The soldiers filed out upon the
pavement, the police having kept a way clear for them, Still there
was silence in the crowd save that near me I could hear a man
sobbing. A trumpeter lifted his bugle and sounded a bar of the
reveille. The clear notes clove the silent air, flooding every street
about us with their silver sound. Suddenly the band began playing.
The tune was Yankee Doodle.
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