hey were seized with the
fever about the same time. The Major was removed to White House, and I
visited him one day in the hospital quarters. Surgeon General Watson,
hospital commandant, took me through the quarters; there was quite a
town of sick men; they lay in wall-tents--about twenty in a tent,--and
there were daily deaths; those that caught the fever, were afterwards
unfit for duty, as they took relapses on resuming the field. The tents
were pitched in a damp cornfield; for the Federals so reverenced their
national shrines, that they forbade White House and lawn to be used for
hospital purposes. Under the best circumstances, a field hospital is a
comfortless place; but here the sun shone like a furnace upon the tents,
and the rains drowned out the inmates. If a man can possibly avoid it,
let him never go to the hospital: for he will be called a "skulker," or
a "shyster," that desires to escape the impending battle. Twenty hot,
feverish, tossing men, confined in a small tent, like an oven, and
exposed to contumely and bad food, should get a wholesome horror of war
and glory.

So far as I could observe and learn, the authorities at White House
carried high heads, and covetous hands. In brief, they lived like
princes, and behaved like knaves. There was one--whose conduct has never
been investigated--who furnished one of the deserted mansions near by,
and brought a lady from the North to keep it in order. He drove a span
that rivalled anything in Broadway, and his wines were luscious. His
establishment reminded me of that of Napoleon III. in the late Italian
war, and yet, this man was receiving merely a Colonel's pay. My
impression is that everybody at White House robbed the Government, and
in the end, to cover their delinquencies, these scoundrels set fire to
an immense quantity of stores, and squared their accounts thus: "Burned
on the Pamunkey, June 28, commissary, quartermaster's, and hospital
stores, one million dollars."

The time was now drawing to a close that I should pass amid the familiar
scenes of this region. The good people at Daker's were still kindly; but
having climbed into the great bed one night, I found my legs aching, my
brain violently throbbing, my chest full of pain and my eyes weak. When
I woke in the morning my lips were fevered, I could eat nothing, and
when I reached my saddle, it seemed that I should faint. In a word, the
Chickahominy fever had seized upon me. My ride to New Bridge was ma