SIXTY years ago there was a law in Illinois that all able-bodied men from the age of 18 to 45 should meet and drill as soldiers every alternate Saturday, from the first Saturday in April till the third Saturday in November. And they mustered at my father’s every time. John L. Perryman, my cousin, was Captain, a large, tall young man, with a powerful voice; we could hear him give the commands very plainly for two hundred yards. He wore a stove-pipe hat, with his long red plume stuck in his hat, and he looked nice and I think he felt big. Ben. Tallman was Orderly Sergeant. I think there was about one hundred men in our precinct; and when Ben. would call the roll, at nine o’clock, every man would answer to his name. Uncle Philip Perryman was fifer, and Harvey Cummings was drummer.

In the morning pretty early the men would begin to come in, and a good many women would come to see the men muster, and some of them would walk three or four miles.

We would listen for the delegation from the West. The fife and drum and the Captain was in that delegation; and when we would hear the music and see that red plume coming around the bend of the road, a boy would think his height was ubout eight feet in his stockings and his avoirdupois was about seven hundred pounds.

James Mitchell run a “still-house” near by and when the men would go into ranks with two or three “snorts” of Mitchell’s “best” they would seem to forget but what they were in the midst of the Revolutionary war, and each man had patriotism and whiskey enough in him for a half-dozen men, but when the whiskey would die in him the patriotism would die too, but the man would live by a small majority.