Recruiting in New York.
--A correspondent of a Washington paper, writing from New York, says:
‘
This park, as viewed from the City Hall steps, presents many strange peculiarities, the specialty being a camp-like appearance.
Behind the chains, instead of grass, are tents of various recruiting regiments.
Every expedient is resorted to for the purpose of gaining recruits.
Some are gotten up in the "pomp and circumstance" of colored handbills, illustrated with cuts representing the horrors of war and the beauties of camp life; others have their bills printed on green paper, green banners of cloth, and the green flag of
Ireland floating along side of the
United States ensign.
Many have infant drummers, who rattle away on their sheepskins with all the enthusiasm of infantile glee.
Others have stationed in a conspicuous place a few of each respective company, arrayed in the exquisite of their peculiar military "rig." In one of the tents I observed a "gemman-of- color" doing the agreeable to all applicants.
Officers may be seen eating, drinking, sleeping, getting their boots blacked by "Sambo," and their chins shaved by "Sambo's" friends, or in some other classical business--
i. e., either turning up their nose, (where it is not turned up naturally,) or curling a dyspeptic moustache.
Not a few women may be seen sitting around on the stones.
Often the "good-bye" scene is rendered quite affecting.
In the barracks were about 1,000 men, or, as a Cecile individual told me, ‘"Sure, when we are at dinner we have about two thousand
hands and one thousand heads, and when we get up the table looks as though three thousand persons had
eat something. "’
’
