Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION

25

of my parents. The wise Hibernian expressed boundless
admiration of the purchase and begged for the loan of the
weapon; he said he was contemplating an excursion that
night through a most dangerous locality on the West
Side to call on a lady he knew. Need it be said that the
precious weapon was confided to Jim, as by one bold spirit
to another, not to be seen again by its purchaser? Or
that there was never appeal to authority up-stairs for its
restitution?
That earliest year of mine in the city seems ten times
longer when looked back upon through the telescope.
Events were moving swiftly toward the great crisis in the
republic's history. Three months after the jocund visit
of the Prince of Wales the first shot of the Civil War was
fired at Commodore Vanderbilt's ocean steamer, the Star
of the West, while she was heading to Fort Sumter with
reinforcements for Major Anderson. I was taken to see
the wound in the Star of the West's side as she lay at a
Hudson River pier after her return to New York. A few
months later I was watching, day after day from our windows through the morning mists, the stacked muskets and
bivouac fires along the cobblestones of Forty-second Street
and the Belgian blocks of Fifth Avenue, where the tall
fellows of the New England regiments, detrained between
the two engine-houses at the upper end of the Park Avenue
tunnel, were heating coffee and warming doughnuts before marching down-town on their way to the front.