oper shelter, food and clothing.
But it was idle to attempt to arrest with blackberry root the diarrhea,
or with wild cherry bark the consumption of a man lying in a cold, damp,
mud hovel, devoured by vermin, and struggling to maintain life upon less
than a pint of unsalted corn meal per diem.

Finding that the doctors issued red pepper for diarrhea, and an imitation
of sweet oil made from peanuts, for the gangrenous sores above described,
I reported to them an imaginary comrade in my tent, whose symptoms
indicated those remedies, and succeeded in drawing a small quantity of
each, two or three times a week. The red pepper I used to warm up our
bread and mush, and give some different taste to the corn meal, which had
now become so loathsome to us. The peanut oil served to give a hint of
the animal food we hungered for. It was greasy, and as we did not have
any meat for three months, even this flimsy substitute was inexpressibly
grateful to palate and stomach. But one morning the Hospital Steward
made a mistake, and gave me castor oil instead, and the consequences were
unpleasant.

A more agreeable remembrance is that of two small apples, about the size
of walnuts, given me by a boy named Henry Clay Montague Porter, of the
Sixteenth Connecticut. He had relatives living in North Carolina, who
sent him a small packs of eatables, out of which, in the fulness of his
generous heart he gave me this share--enough to make me always remember
him with kindness.

Speaking of eatables reminds me of an incident. Joe Darling, of the
First Maine, our Chief of Police, had a sister living at Augusta, Ga.,
who occasionally came to Florence with basket of food and other
necessaries for her brother. On one of these journeys, while sitting in
Colonel Iverson's tent, waiting for her brother to be brought out of
prison, she picked out of her basket a nicely browned doughnut and handed
it to the guard pacing in front of the tent, with:

"Here, guard, wouldn't you like a genuine Yankee doughnut?"

The guard-a lank, loose-jointed Georgia cracker--who in all his life seen
very little more inviting food than the his hominy and molasses, upon
which he had been raised, took the cake, turned it over and inspected it
curiously for some time without apparently getting the least idea of what
it was for, and then handed it back to the donor, saying:

"Really, mum, I don't believe I've got any use for it"

CHAPTER LXXII.

DULL WINTER D