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

IN CIVIL WAR TIME

27

stration of the new ambulance-and-stretcher system in
the Academy of Music at Irving Place and Fourteenth
Street. The great opera-house was thronged with spectators holding free tickets; but I am sure nobody present
could have been more thrilled than myself at the representation of a desperate combat, with its rattle of musketry
and boom of heavy artillery and glare of red fire and
clouds of copiously produced and highly pervasive battle
smoke that obstinately refused to respect the footlight
frontier. The stage was strewn with dead and wounded
in blue and gray. Then Doctor Pierce's improved ambulances entered the scene, shiny in new varnish and drawn
by cobs smartly caparisoned in new harness. Doctor
Pierce's skilled stretcher-bearers descended rapidly with
their improved stretchers and picked up the supposedly
mangled unfortunates, deposited them in the improved
ambulances, and, accompanied by spirited applause from
the deadhead audience, drove off to the imaginary fieldhospital somewhere in the wings. In less time than it
takes for the telling the battle stage was cleared of its
welter.
After this exhibition in the Academy of Music, perhaps
in consequence of it and its coincidence with the distressing
sequels to the second Bull Run, Uncle Henry obtained an
appointment for a certain morning at nine o'clock at the
White House to explain his ideas to the President in
person. He was good enough to take me with him. The
journey was crowded with events that recorded themselves indelibly upon the gray matter of an impressionable
boy of ten. In the early sixties the night express to Washington proceeded by the old Camden and Amboy route,
with a long ferriage from Manhattan at the start. The

train we took at Amboy was de luxe in the novelty of
its accommodations; it boasted a diner and a sleeper.
The diner of 1862 was a baggage-car, retired from heavy
work on account of long service in the transportation of