sacrifice on my part both in a pecuniary and intellectual point of view.  By joining the army at this time, three years of the best portion of my life would be spent with a low groveling set of men:  taking them as a mass.  I have lived but twenty two summers, and it seems to me as though it was folly for me to go south to be shot at by rebels; rebels who are far inferior in intellectual propensities; but perhaps superior with the rifles.  But as young as I am and as little as I have seen of this world, young and robust, I am going to enlist and it will be likely that I will be handed down to an untimely grave by having a rebel bullet to pass into my body.
  My few days that I have passed upon this earth seems as though it was a dream, and that I was passing in one day from
