Washington DC Letter 4

Dear Mother,
I received your letter of the 22nd – I feel uneasy about you all the time, & hope I shall get a letter to-day, & find you have recovered,
Well, the Review is over, & it was very grand – it was too much & too impressive, to be described – but you will see a good deal about it in the papers. If you can imagine a great wide avenue like Flatbush avenue, quite flat, & stretching as far as you can see, with a great white building half as big as fort Greene on a hill at the commencement of the avenue, & then through this avenue marching solid ranks of soldiers, 20 or 25 abreast, just marching steady all day long for two days, without intermission, one regiment after another, real war-worn soldiers, that have been marching & fighting for years – sometimes for an hour nothing but cavalry, just solid ranks, on good horses, with sabers glistening, & carbines hanging by their saddles, & their clothes showing hard service, but they mostly all good-looking hardy young men – then great masses of guns, batteries of cannon, four or six abreast, each drawn by six horses, with the gunners seated on the ammunition wagons – & these perhaps a long while in