n the
undulations before the house. It may be permitted even for one who is
supposed to think of nothing but powder and ball to notice one of these
grand trees. Let the ivy-covered stem of the Big Oak of Camp Cameron
take its place in literature! And now enough of scenery. The landscape
will stay, but the troops will not. There are trees and slopes of
green-sward elsewhere, and shrubbery begins to blossom in these bright
days of May before a thousand pretty homes. The tents and the tent-life
are more interesting for the moment than objects which cannot decamp.

The old villa serves us for head-quarters. It is a respectable place,
not without its pretensions. Four granite pillars, as true grit as if
the two Presidents Adams had lugged them on their shoulders all the way
from Quincy, Mass., make a carriage-porch. Here is the Colonel in the
big west parlor, the Quartermaster and Commissary in the rooms with
sliding-doors on the east, the Hospital upstairs, and so on. Other
rooms, numerous as the cells in a monastery, serve as quarters for the
Engineer Company. These dens are not monastic in aspect. The house is,
of course, a Certosa, so far as the gentler sex are concerned; but no
anchorites dwell here at present. If the Seventh disdained everything
but soldiers' fare,--which it does not,--common civility would require
that it should do violence to its disinclination for comfort and luxury,
and consume the stores sent down by ardent patriots in New York. The
cellars of the villa overflow with edibles, and in the greenhouse is a
most appetizing array of barrels, boxes, cans, and bottles, shipped here
that our Sybarites might not sigh for the flesh-pots of home. Such trash
may do very well to amuse the palate in these times of half-peace,
half-hostility; but when

"war, which for a space does fail,
Shall doubly thundering swell the gale,"

then every soldier should drop gracefully to the simple ration, and
cease to dabble with frying-pans. Cooks to their aprons, and soldiers to
their guns!

Our tents are pitched on a level clover-field sloping to the front
for our parade-ground. We use the old wall tent without a fly. It is
necessary to live in one of these awhile to know the vast superiority of
the Sibley pattern. Sibley's tent is a wrinkle taken from savage life.
It is the Sioux buffalo-skin, lodge, or _Tepee_, improved,--a cone
truncated at the top and fitted with a movable apex for ventilation. A
single tent-pol