,
sor-r-r--Oi niver tried."

Si's mother, like most of the well-to-do farmers' wives in Indiana, was
undoubtedly a good cook, and she trained up her daughters to do honor to
her teachings, so that Si undoubtedly knew what properly-prepared food
was. From the time he was big enough to spank he had fared sumptuously
every day. In the gush of patriotic emotions that prompted him to enlist
he scarcely thought of this feature of the case. If it entered his mind
at all, he felt that he could safely trust all to the goodness of so
beneficent a Government as that for the preservation of which he had
offered himself as a target for the rebels to shoot at. He thought it
no more than fair to the brave soldiers that Uncle Sam should furnish
professional cooks for each company, who would serve everything up in
the style of a first-class city restaurant. So, after Si got down among
the boys and found how it really was, it was not long till his inside
was a volcano of rebellion that threatened serious results.

[Illustration: SI FALLS OUT WITH HIS FOOD 055 ]

When, therefore, Si lifted up his voice and cried aloud, and spared
not--when he said that he could get as good coffee as that furnished him
by dipping his cup into a tan-vat; when he said that the meat was not
good soap-grease, and that the potatoes and beans had not so much taste
and nutrition in them as so much pine-shavings, he was probably nearer
right than grumblers usually are.

"Give it to 'em, Si," his comrades would Say, when he turned up his loud
bazoo on the rations question. "They ought to get it ten times worse.
When we come out we expected that some of us would get shot by the
rebels, but we didn't calculate that we were going to be poisoned in
camp by a lot of dirty, lazy potwrastlers."

One morning after roll-call the Orderly-Sergeant came up to Si and said:

"There's been so much chin-music about this cooking-business that
the Captain's ordered the cooks to go back to duty, and after this
everybody'll have to take his regular turn at cooking. It'll be your
turn to-day, and you'll stay in camp and get dinner."

When Co. Q marched out for the forenoon drill. Si pulled off his blouse
and set down on a convenient log to think out how he should go to work.
Up to this time he had been quite certain that he knew all about cooking
that it was worth while to know. Just now none of his knowledge seemed
to be in usable shape, and the more he thought about it the les