hed in the last agonies.

Their fate seemed harder than that of any who had died before them.
It was doubtful if many of them knew that they were at last inside of our
own lines.

Again the kind-hearted boys of the brigade crowded around us with
proffers of service. Of an Ohio boy who directed his kind tenders to
Andrews and me, we procured a chunk of coarse rosin soap about as big as
a pack of cards, and a towel. Never was there as great a quantity of
solid comfort got out of that much soap as we obtained. It was the first
that we had since that which I stole in Wirz's headquarters, in June
--nine months before. We felt that the dirt which had accumulated upon
us since then would subject us to assessment as real estate if we were
in the North.

Hurrying off to a little creek we began our ablutions, and it was not
long until Andrews declared that there was a perceptible sand-bar forming
in the stream, from what we washed off. Dirt deposits of the Pliocene
era rolled off feet and legs. Eocene incrustations let loose reluctantly
from neck and ears; the hair was a mass of tangled locks matted with nine
months' accumulation of pitch pine tar, rosin soot, and South Carolina
sand, that we did not think we had better start in upon it until we
either had the shock cut off, or had a whole ocean and a vat of soap to
wash it out with.

After scrubbing until we were exhausted we got off the first few outer
layers--the post tertiary formation, a geologist would term it--and the
smell of many breakfasts cooking, coming down over the hill, set our
stomachs in a mutiny against any longer fasting.

We went back, rosy, panting, glowing, but happy, to get our selves some
breakfast.

Should Providence, for some inscrutable reason, vouchsafe me the years of
Methuselah, one of the pleasantest recollections that will abide with me
to the close of the nine hundredth and sixty-ninth year, will be of that
delightful odor of cooking food which regaled our senses as we came back.
From the boiling coffee and the meat frying in the pan rose an incense
sweeter to the senses a thousand times than all the perfumes of far
Arabia. It differed from the loathsome odor of cooking corn meal as much
as it did from the effluvia of a sewer.

Our noses were the first of our senses to bear testimony that we had
passed from the land of starvation to that of plenty. Andrews and I
hastened off to get our own breakfast, and soon had a half-gallon of