Boston, July 9, 1861
Yesterday we [the Battalion] went out to escort Gordon’s regiment off — the one raised by the subscription of the Boston gentlemen. There were, as I have told you, lots of my friends in it, and I should have been, sorry not to have bid them good-bye; but not till they were gone did I find that the one I should most wished to have seen was gone, and I did n’t even see him as the train went off. For Stephen Perkins joined as a Second Lieutenant at the last minute, and I did n’t know the fact till he was on his way to Virginia. It made me feel quite badly and I have n’t got over it yet. Off they all went, however, and apparently in good spirits and full of life and hope, and the last I saw of the train, Wilder Dwight, rapidly disappearing on its last platform, was waving his hat and dancing a saraband at me, which I returned from the pile of gravel on which we were drawn up, with my whole heart. Sam Quincy was swept by me as he stood on the lower step of a platform looking at his old friends in the cadets, but I did not catch his eye. He looked much as usual. When Hal Russell passed he caught my eye and went through a war dance, with that eager look on his face which a man has when bidding good-bye to old friends on his way to the wars, and when he only recollects pleasant things about them; but Stephen Perkins I did n’t see, even as the train went by. They’re on their way now and I certainly envy them very much. Next comes Frank Palfrey and then there is n’t much of any one to go after that. John Palfrey has come home, by the way, sick — a typhoid fever, but the symptoms are said to be mild. He was over-worked in the sun, surveying, but they do not seem to be apprehensive. Caspar Crowninshield has got home from Washington and expects a commission in the regular army, and, I have little doubt, will get it. . . .
