, and they
would not let him, and were just holding to starve him to death for pure
meanness. He said when he was at home it took a good-sized hen to make
him a meal, and now we get nothing scarcely but bread, and he could eat
four days' rations--two loaves or three pounds at one meal. So he raged
and lectured as a champion eater until two men who had a little money got
up a fifty-cent bet on him. He was to eat two loaves, or three pounds of
bread, in thirty minutes. A crowd gathered and much interest was
manifested in the contest, and the eating began. In the excitement he took
too much water. In ten minutes the first loaf disappeared and three
canteens, or nine pints of water, with it. Then he said he did not have
quite enough, but did not feel like he could eat all of the other loaf, so
they need not cut it; that his stomach had shrunk up until he could not
eat as much as he thought he could. After that he could no longer command
a hearing, as his record as a champion eater was all he had to stand on.
He is now--1907--living happily with his third wife and has plenty to eat,
but says his appetite is not quite as good as it used to be.

SCENES AT APPOMATTOX--STRAGGLERS IN THE UNION ARMY.

Dr. Thomas L. Carson, my mother's youngest brother, who was in the
Thirty-fourth North Carolina Regiment, Scale's Brigade, tells the
following:

"We had stacked our muskets in surrender in the open beside the road,
awaiting our paroles, when a large column of Federal troops passed us in
steady, quiet tramp, followed by the rear guard bringing up about 2,000
stragglers. These stragglers wore a conglomeration of every trashy type to
be found in the Yankee army. Foreigners of every tongue, mixed with every
American type--old gray-headed men, beardless boys, big, greasy Negroes,
etc., etc., all with battered and tattered clothing, some bareheaded and
barefooted, and many without coats; some only had one pant leg on--all
under a strong guard of peart-proud soldiers marching beside them with
fixed bayonets. As they came along one big, stout fellow exclaimed, "Oh,
yes, Johnnies; we've got you at last." A proud, peart-looking guard said,
"Shut your mouth, you cowardly devil, or I'll pop my bayonet in you. You
want to crow over these men. If many of our men had been like you, General
Lee might now have had his headquarters in Boston instead of this
surrender."

Dr. Carson says, as they started home, a young officer from Ohio walked
alon