mber of the firm of Cutts & Dunn, who made my uniform,
and who will make your clothes, if you wish, my dear reader, and charge
you rather less than three times their value, after the manner of
Washington tailors; which charge will appear especially moderate when
you remember that the clothes will almost fit, and won't wear out so
very soon after all, as is the way with Washington clothes. Indeed, as
the tactics say, 'this remark is general for all the deployments;' and
the same may as well be said of all bills and things made in the great
city of sheds, contractors, politicians, dust, and unfinished buildings.
But is this a description of Washington? We are at Chickfield, where the
loyal Maryland farmers come to us to protect their loyalty, to charge a
dollar a panel for old worm fences thrown down by 'the boys,' to sell
forage at double prices, to reclaim runaway negroes, and to assure us of
the impossibility of subjugating the South. And here, in the peaceful
village of Chickfield, the object of our expedition having been happily
frustrated by the newspapers, we enjoy our ease for a week or ten days,
and our first camp experiences. Oh! that first experience of unboxing
tents smelling loudly as of candle grease, of finding the right poles,
of vainly endeavoring to pitch them straight, of hot and excited
officers rushing hither and thither in a flurry, trying to instruct the
different squads in their work, and straightway frustrated by the thick
heads, or worse, by the inevitable suggestions of those remarkably
intelligent corporals, who seem to consider themselves as having a
special mission direct from heaven to know everything except how to do
what they are bid. And oh! the first camp cookery, when everything is
overdone except what is underdone; when the soup is water, and the
coffee grounds, and the tea (we had tea in the _three_-months!) senna!
And after a day of worry, hurry, confusion, and awful cooking, the first
rough sleep, with a root running across your ribs, and a sizable gravel
indenting the small of your back! How the teamsters talk all night, and
the sentinels call wildly, incessantly, for the corporal of the guard!
How you dream of being hung on a wire, as if to dry, with your head on a
jagged rock; of an army of sentinels pacing your breast, ceaselessly
engaged in coming to an 'order arms;' of millions of ants crawling over
and through you; of having your legs suddenly thrust into an icehouse,
and a bru