be in such
demand that they'd have to be counted out to the soldiers as if
they were money, but that's what's the matter now. And that
ain't all. The boys will stand around until the box is emptied,
and then they will pick up the fragments that have fallen to
the ground in the divide, and scrape off the mud with their
knives, and eat the little pieces, and glad to get them. Now
and then, to help out the sow-belly, we get quarter rations of
fresh beef from the carcass of a Tennessee steer that the
quartermaster manages to lay hands on somehow. But it's awful
poor beef, lean, slimy, skinny and stringy. The boys say that
one can throw a piece up against a tree, and it will just stick
there and quiver and twitch for all the world like one of those
blue-bellied lizards at home will do when you knock him off a
fence rail with a stick.

"I just wish that old Forrest, who is the cause of about all
this trouble, had to go without anything to eat until he was so
weak that he would have to be fed with a spoon. Maybe after he
had been hungry real good for a while he'd know how it feels
himself, and would let our railroads alone.

"But I want to tell you that I had a real bully Christmas
dinner, in spite of old Forrest and the whole caboodle. It was
just a piece of the greatest good luck I've had for many a day.

"When Christmas morning came I was feeling awful blue. In spite
of all I could do, I couldn't help but think about the good
dinner you folks at home would have that day, and I pictured it
all out in my imagination. Then about every one of the boys had
something to say about what he would have for Christmas dinner
if he was home, and they'd run over the list of good things
till it was almost enough to make one go crazy. To make matters
worse, just the day before in an old camp I had found some
tattered fragments of a New York illustrated newspaper with a
whole lot of pictures about Thanksgiving Day in the Army of the
Potomac. They were shown as sitting around piles of roast
turkeys, pumpkin pies, pound cake, and goodness knows what
else, and I took it for granted that they would have the same
kind of fodder today. You see, the men in that a