st of some high
ridge, to stand and listen to the roar of our cannon pounding at
Vicksburg, and watch the flight of the shells from Grant's siege guns
and from the heavy guns of our gunboats on the Mississippi. The shells
they threw seemed principally to be of the "fuse" variety, and the
burning fuse, as the shell flew through the air, left a stream of
bright red light behind it like a rocket. I would lean on my gun and
contemplate the spectacle with far more complacency and satisfaction
than was felt when anxiously watching the practice on us by the other
fellows at Salem Cemetery about six months before.

There was another thing I was wont to observe with peculiar attention,
when on picket at night during the siege; namely, the operations of the
Signal Corps. In the night time they used lighted lanterns in the
transmission of intelligence, and they had a code by which the signals
could be read with practically the same accuracy as if they had been
printed words. The movements of the lights looked curious and strange,
something elf-like, with a suspicion of witchcraft, or deviltry of some
kind, about them. They would make all sorts of gyrations, up, down, a
circle, a half circle to the right, then one to the left, and so on.
Sometimes they would be unusually active. Haines' Bluff would talk to
Snyder's; Snyder's to Sherman's headquarters; Sherman's to Grant's, and
back and forth, all along the line. Occasionally at some station the
lights would act almost like some nervous man talking at his highest
speed in a perfect splutter of excitement,--and then they would seem as
if drunk, or crazy. Of course, I knew nothing of the code of
interpretation, and so understood nothing,--could only look and
speculate. In modern warfare the telephone has probably superseded the
Signal Service, but the latter certainly played an important part in
our Civil War.

During the siege we lived high on some comestibles not included in the
regular army rations. Corn was in the roasting ear state, and there
were plenty of big fields of it beyond and near the picket lines, and
we helped ourselves liberally. Our favorite method of cooking the corn
was to roast it in the "shuck." We would "snap" the ears from the
stalk, leaving the shuck intact, daub over the outside a thin plaster
of mud (or sometimes just saturate the ears in water), then cover them
with hot ashes and live coals. By the time the fire had consumed the
shuck down to the last or