[10] and a chance meeting with whom has been already described in his letters, speaks of that meeting as follows:—
In going up the Potomac on the transport we were very much crowded. My company were in a dark room or hold, down two flights of stairs. You could hardly get about decks, so great the crowd, and some of the officers of the vessel who knew me had hunted for me in vain; but George sought me out. As I lay upon the floor, I heard his voice asking, “Is Frank Balch here?” There was none of the stiffness of an officer in his greeting, and I knew at once that we met on the old terms. He seemed to me more sober than of old. His manner was as frank and as candid as ever, but more subdued. But one thing about him was certainly unchanged: his “pluck” —for I know no so good word for it—was the same. He reminded me of the old times when he used to plunge headlong into the struggling mass of football players, not to make a show of courage, as was the case with some, but with a most uncompromising determination to drive the ball to the goal. Yet that you know was a most disheartening time. We were retreating; we feared McClellan would resign as soon as we were in a place of safety; and the campaign in the West seemed almost as disastrous as that in the East.That he bore constantly in mind his liability to pass suddenly from this earth, to him so bright and beautiful, we learn from the careful arrangement of his worldly affairs, and the anxiety he manifested to ‘set his house in order.’ As early as June 1, 1862, at the time of the battle of Fair Oaks, we find this entry in his memorandum, as if hastily written in pencil: ‘Bills which, in case of my death, I wish paid with money due me by the United States.’ Also, ‘My watch to be given to my brother Charles, my books to my father and mother, and after their death to Harvard College.’ And on September 16th, the day before his death, a statement of his affairs, with directions for their settlement, ‘in the event,’ as he says, ‘of my death in action.’ The beloved only brother, so affectionately remembered in the midst of danger, was at the date of the bequest serving his country in the Department of the Gulf. Being seized with fever brought on by fatigue and exposure at the battle of Baton Rouge, he breathed out his soul on the 9th
