her robe and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details
that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History.
Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That
was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his
description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the
country people were crowded when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica. But
when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque
details about the rookeries and the wine-jars inhabited by the
newcomers. Diogenes' jar, commonly misnamed a tub, was no invention, and
I have known less comfortable quarters than the hogshead which I
occupied for a day or two in one of my outings during the war.

The plague was too serious a matter for even Aristophanes to make fun
of, and the annalist of the war between the States will not find any
parallel in the chronicles of the South. There was no such epidemic as
still shows its livid face in the pages of Thucydides and the verses of
Lucretius. True, some diseases of which civic life makes light proved to
be veritable scourges in camp. Measles was especially fatal to the
country-bred, and for abject misery I have never seen anything like
those cases of measles in which nostalgia had supervened. Nostalgia,
which we are apt to sneer at as a doctor's name for homesickness, and to
class with cachexy and borborygmus, was a power for evil in those days,
and some of our finest troops were thinned out by it, notoriously the
North Carolinians, whose attachment to the soil of their State was as
passionate as that of any Greeks, ancient or modern, Attic or
Peloponnesian.

[Note: Gresham's law was anticipated by Aristophanes, Ran. 718, foll.]

But the frightful mortality of the camp does not strike the imagination
so forcibly as does the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman cares
to analyze hospital reports and compare the medical with the surgical
history of the war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is not so
easily forgotten, and the dominant note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the
dominant note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as military. The
Confederate soldier was often on short rations, but the civilian was not
much better off. I do not mean those whose larders were swept by the
besom of the invaders. "Not a dust of flour, not an ounce of meat, left
in the house," was not an uncommon cry along the line of march; but it
was heard elsewh