rally turned to the little old
log cabin in the backwoods of western Illinois, and I couldn't help
thinking about the nice Christmas dinner that I knew the folks at
home would sit down to on that day.

There would be a great chicken pot pie, with its savory crust and a
superabundance of light, puffy dumplings; delicious light, hot
biscuits; a big ball of our own home-made butter, yellow as gold;
broad slices of juicy ham, the product of hogs of our own
fattening, and home cured with hickory-wood smoke; fresh eggs from
the barn in reckless profusion, fried in the ham gravy; mealy Irish
potatoes, baked in their jackets; coffee with cream about half an
inch thick; apple butter and crab apple preserves; a big plate of
wild honey in the comb; and winding up with a thick wedge of mince
pie that mother knew so well how to make--such mince pie, in fact,
as was made only in those days, and is now as extinct as the dodo.
And when I turned from these musings upon the bill of fare they
would have at home to contemplate the dreary realities of my own
possible dinner for the day--my oyster can full of coffee and a
quarter ration of hardtack and sow-belly comprised the menu. If the
eyes of some old soldier should light upon these lines, and he
should thereupon feel disposed to curl his lip with unutterable
scorn and say: "This fellow was a milksop and ought to have been
fed on Christian Commission and Sanitary goods, and put to sleep at
night with a warm rock at his feet;"--I can only say in extenuation
that the soldier whose feelings I have been trying to describe was
only a boy--and, boys, you probably know how it was yourselves
during the first year of your army life. But, after all, the
soldier had a Christmas dinner that day, and it is of that I have
started out to speak.

Several years ago my old army letters, which had been so carefully
kept and cherished for all these many years, passed from the
keeping of those to whom they had been addressed, back into the
possession of him who penned them, and now, after the lapse of
fifty-four years, one of these old letters, written to my father,
shall re-tell the story of this Christmas dinner.

"Jackson, Tennessee,
December 27, 1862.

"Mr. J. O. S