ly that, but I then stood six
feet one inch high, whilst not one man in that company stood more than
five feet seven inches. I made my complaint to the captain, who
promised that as soon as there was a vacancy, I should go back to my
old company, and that cheered me up a little, but made me look with
intense anxiety for the change back again.

Until it occurred, however, I had to change my abode, and live with
four privates of the same seventh company in a private house, the
landlady of which kept as nice a pig in her sty as I had ever seen in
the Peninsula. Close by our quarters was the officers' mess-room, the
sergeant of which had offered our landlady sixteen dollars for her
pig; but the old woman would not take less than eighteen; so instead
of giving that he offered the four men billeted with me the sixteen
dollars to steal it for him, in return for the old lady's craftiness,
as he had offered quite the fair value. The deed was done that very
night, the pig being conveyed out of sight to the mess room; and in
the morning, when the old lady had as usual warmed the pig's
breakfast, she found to her surprise the sty empty.

She soon made a terrible noise over the affair, and immediately
suspected the man who had offered to buy it; which soon got to his
ears, and obliged him to make away with it for a time, for fear of
being searched; so he got some of the men to heave it over a wall at
the back of the mess-room. The four men who had stolen it soon got
scent of this, and wishing to serve the sergeant out for his meanness,
and likewise have some of the pig, they went, unbeknown of course to
him, and cut off about a quarter of it, which they appropriated to our
own use, and brought back to be cooked in the old woman's house; so
that the sergeant had better have given the two more dollars, and come
by the whole pig honestly after all.

Some difficulty was experienced by my fellow-lodgers in cooking their
portion, as the landlady had generally before got their food ready;
but this was at length accomplished in our own private room, with a
kettle that we had borrowed from the old lady herself. I likewise had
a taste of the poor woman's missing pig, which we found to be very
good and acceptable. Fortunately, she never suspected us at all, but
often talked to us during our stay there, of her sad loss; and indeed
she was in general very kind to us, often going so far as to give us
some dried chestnuts, of which she had an a