You asked me how our two brothers came to be captured.

Let me begin at the beginning, and you shall hear all about it.

You know when freedom is first born she is a puny infant and has to be suckled.

That she cries for blood instead of milk is something we can't help.

So all the young men of Toroczko enlisted in the militia,--every mother's son of them,--and they are now serving in the eleventh, the thirty-second, and the seventy-third battalions.