farm; but now, in her grief and anger, she was beside herself-savage as some wild creature of the forest that had been deprived of its young. Captain Arts, in a statement which he gave to the newspapers months afterward, wrote that Mrs. Garvin told him:

"I was in New York looking for Con when I met three rowdies from South Troy. They asked me if I was looking for Con. I said I was. They said, "You need not look for him; he has gone for a soldier.""" The statement goes on: "She said that these rowdies had sold him for $300. Then she charged that Keeper Taber had sold Con as a substitute for himself or a friend." Captain Arts, in his fragmentary account of Mrs. Garvin's accusation, implies that, in one breath, she had charged two separate perpetrators with the commission of the same crime. Her meaning, it seems reasonable to infer, was that the three men of South Troy had acted in collusion with Keeper Taber of the County House. Perhaps this was her suspicion only; maybe the South Troy men had tried thus to shift the blame. After such an accusation it was open and endless war between Con's mother and the Superintendent of the County Poor.

Catherine Garvin's unexpected meeting with the three young thugs suggests a sorry picture that of the lonely little woman's eager greeting to the familiar faces from home. Had they met her Connie? See her as she awaits the answer -the thin, worn body in the plain black dress, polished and green and rusty brown with time, the more rusty bonnet that perched far back on the knob of graystreaked hair; a little woman, who peers up into the hard faces and whose eyes anxiously follow every uneasy shift, every sidelong glance of the three. The crowds that had been so confusing but a moment ago are forgotten; those who jostle against her and eddy swiftly past on either side are unfelt, unseen. She has eyes only for the three who had known Con back home. Then came their brutal answer: "You needn't look for him; he has gone for a soldier!" Perhaps she was stunned, bewildered for the moment, and let them walk away. More in character would be the guess that she screamed and tried to seize them, and that they broke

away and lost themselves in the crowd, leaving behind them a helpless little woman crying something about her Con, who had been stolen to be made a soldier.

Cornelius Garvin was not the first nor the only person to be sold into the army. Less than a month before his abduction the draft had been put into operation, and the riots to resist it had failed. Any man whose name had been drawn from the wheel might purchase exemption by the payment of three hundred dollars, but it was cheaper to hire or buy—a substitute. At once a horde of depraved men became brokers in substitutes, a new calling that instantly developed into a business of immense profits of which the money paid to the brokers by drafted men for substitutes was the smallest part. Many of the Northern states, made desperate by ineffectual efforts to fill their quotas of recruits, began to offer greater and greater bounties to induce enlistments; county, state, and national bounties totaled to a tempting sum-in New York as high as $725. It was this money that brought out the small-sized army of bountybrokers. To their call rose the scum of the country. The idle, the dissolute, the criminal, flocked to the brokers, who enlisted them, shared with them the cash bounties, and then, by bribery-stupendous in its extent-corrupted guards and officials into permitting their recruits to escape and be enlisted again and again from other districts or from cities near by. Many were of course firmly caught and forced into the army, but of those who never saw a musket there were many more. Surgeons were bribed into accepting the aged, the infirm, and the crippled; clerks were taught to forge papers on which bounty might be collected for recruits who had never existed. It was a gold-yielding Klondike.

And this went on for months unchecked by the authorities, who seem to have been stupefied by the enormity of it all, or blinded to it by their own harassments. Worst of all, boys of fourteen and fifteen were drugged and enlisted, bounty-brokers and women of the streets swearing that they were the parents of these minors and that they gave the necessary consent; foreigners unable to speak English suddenly found themselves

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in the army-they knew not how; old men were made drunk, their white hair and beards dyed, and themselves started for the battle-fields and camps. Yet such as these could come to their senses, communicate with friends, and eventually escape. But for poor, helpless Con Garvin there could come no such unclouding of the mind.

Back in Troy his mother took up the search for him. She could not wait for the promised investigation by the Superintendent of County Poor. Her Con was in the war; she must find him and bring him home. Sergeant Kane, her old neighbor, remembers how she came night after night to his mother, and cried and moaned, or shrilly poured out a torrent of invective against those who had stolen her little boy-that was the woman of her. In the daytime she did not weep; she worked harder than most men have ever worked, washing clothes, cleaning officesanything that would bring money enough to enable her to look for her boy.

In November she reported the case to the War Department; weeks passed, and there had been nothing done. Then, in some unrecorded manner, she discovered that Con had been enlisted into the Fiftysecond Regiment, New York Volunteers. How she managed to make this discovery is one of the most remarkable, most inexplicable features of her story. With this information she went to Washington, straight to Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps then for the first time she knew real hope. No one in trouble had ever left the presence of that sad-eyed man without at least words of comfort and the friendly clasp of a great, strong hand. To him she poured out her story-volubly, doubtless, probably with weeping and with calls to the Virgin and to all the saints to bless him and requite him. And the President, stooping under his own too great burden, bent a little lower that he might take upon his shoulders her burden, too. He gave her a pass, good throughout the army, and a letter to the Secretary of War in which he asked that she be given aid in the search for her son. Secretary Stanton wrote an order for the discharge of Cornelius Garvin, and Mrs. Garvin was sent to Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, Provost Marshal of the War Department.

She

A detective was detailed to accompany her to the Army of the Potomac, then in the vicinity of Brandy Station. went at once to the camp of the Fiftysecond New York Regiment, but she could not find Con. No such person was there- that was all: no such person there. How hope must have numbed as she slowly comprehended the meaning of the words. Then, day after day, week after week, she searched the army, camp by camp, regiment by regiment, sent here, sent there; now certain, as some pitying, over-sanguine informant directed her, that within the hour she would surely find him; now utterly disheartened, all but hopeless, and exhausted by her search.

There were no battles, but there was worse disease; and there were days when she looked in terror into rows of dead faces beside trenches cut in the frozen ground, or in almost equal terror walked up and down, hour after hour, past rows of countless hospital cots, now starting forward at some fancied resemblance, now pausing to catch again some delirious cry which for the moment she had thought to have been Con's. The weather was bitterly cold, yet there were heavy rains that froze as they fell. She obtained food and shelter where and when she could. Over and over again she told her story-that to her never became monotonous, never grew old-at camp-fires and in officers' mess-tents, at headquarters and among the baggage trains, until the whole army must have buzzed with the story of Con Garvin.

At last Catherine Garvin, worn out, disheartened, her money almost gone, gave up and went back to Troy. Her search had failed in the army, but she indomitably began over again from the other end. She went back to her washing and to the cleaning of offices, but when she could she told Con's story, until slowly, little by little, she set a-turning the mills of the gods. That same month, January, the district attorney of Troy, John H. Colby-to whom Mrs. Garvin had taken letters in which many prominent men, asserting that a great wrong had been committed, demanded that he investigate - presented the case to the grand jury. Almost at the same time a search, instituted by Major-General Han

To the grand jury, Mrs. Garvin's statement was to the effect that "on or about September 7th, 1863, as your petitioner is informed, the keeper of the County House sold said Cornelius into the army for between $300 and $400." She told that she had made search for him, and had found that he had entered the Fifty-second Regiment, New York Volunteers, but had been "transferred" therefrom. Then, "Your petitioner called at the County House and made inquiries. Was informed by wife of keeper that her son, the said Cornelius, was gone; that you' (meaning your petitioner) 'must not feel sorry for him, as he was no benefit to you.' That said keeper drew from his pocket a wallet and said to your petitioner, This is the money that I got for him. Look at this '-holding it up to your petitioner."

Presumably this unsupported statement did not constitute sufficient evidence, for the grand jury refused to indict. The district attorney later wrote to Captain Arts: "No evidence was adduced implicating any person in his abduction. . . . I do not know of any evidence or ground of suspicion tending in any manner whatever to implicate you or Mr. Taber with his alleged abduction."

Thus, by the grand jury's action, the names of Captain Arts and Keeper Taber, of the County House, were completely cleared. But the investigation did nothing toward finding Con.

The search conducted in January by the War Department was much more satisfactory-as far as it went. It was proved that

"Cornelius Garvin-it is supposed under an assumed name did enlist in the United States service in the city of New York on or about the 8th day of September, 1863; was sent to Rikers Island, New York Harbor; left Rikers Island about the middle of September, 1863, in the steamer Daniel Webster; arrived at Alexandria, Virginia; thence was forwarded to Mitchells Station,

Virginia, where he joined the Fifty-second Regiment, New York Volunteers, on or about the 23d day of September, 1863."

To this point the evidence is clear, precise, and uncontroverted, but beyond it all is a maze of conflicting testimony,

wilderment. So much, however, had been proved that an official investigation was begun in March, 1864, and the inquiry developed the feeble and profitless theory that one John Garvey, a substitute, aged nineteen-rejected because of partial insanity and sent from Mitchells Station, September 24th, 1863, to Camp Convalescent, Alexandria-was none other than Cornelius Garvin; because, "in the recollection of the late surgeon's clerk, the personal appearance of this man 'conforms precisely' to Garvin's." Very good; but Camp Convalescent's records contain no such name as John Garvey. Who John Garvey was, and what his fate may have been, seems never to have been further investigated, and so the discovery of his loss was of no aid toward the finding of the lost Cornelius Garvin, after all.

Then the War Department went in for affidavits and statements of men who claimed to have seen and known Con Garvin. Mrs. Garvin on her own account made a collection, too. Brought together, these certificates are so many sticks that have but vigorously stirred an already muddied pool-save in one particular: by their aid a sight, at one point, is to be had of the bottom, and at that point lies Company I, of the Fifty-second.

Six privates certified to Mrs. Garvin that "we have seen Cornelius Garvin, known him, and could identify him. And we hereby state to the best of our opinion that he is in the Fifty-second Regiment, New York Volunteers, at present" [February 14, 1864]. Whereupon one Samuel White, evidently to discredit the signers of that statement, certified that these men had been transferred to another regiment in September, 1863, and had left him and Cornelius Garvin with the Fiftysecond; but that he, Samuel White, had not seen Garvin since leaving Mitchells Station. Concerning Samuel White's testimony the War Department's memorandum reads: "The certificate . . . is false and evidently is intended to deceive, without being a forgery. The name Samuel White does not appear on the books or returns, but the name of Emanuel White is found there, and his signature . is so unlike the signature of the appended certificate as to entirely preclude the belief that both