was justified in leaving a vacant chair in that household; and that night he slipped out of bed, wrapped in a handkerchief a few necessary articles, took from his father's wallet the exact amount his father owed him, stole out of the house, and the next morning took the first western bound train from a station twenty-five miles away. And that was the last that we heard from him. All attempts to trace him had failed, and his father had learned to tell the story without showing emotion-always ending with the prophecy: "But I believe the boy will come back sometime, and he will do well, for he was honest when he might just as well have taken a hundred dollars more than belonged to him."

All this flashed through my mind as I looked at the ruddy, stalwart young fellow who grasped my hand, and I easily recognized the matured features which had once been so familiar. He told me his storyhow at first be had seen hard times, and had resolved never to write home till he was in an independent position; how he had begun to get established and was doing well, when the war broke out; how he had enlisted in the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery, had been promoted, and had at last written to his father; how he had received most cordial letters from all his friends, and had learned from them that I too, was a soldier; and how, learning that my regiment was in the vicinity, he had sought me out at once.

I was, of course, delighted to meet him again, and we were together much of the time while my division lay quiet. But soon the army moved toward Fredericksburg, and as his company remained in the fortifications, I did not meet him again during the war. We corresponded, however, and I learned that in the winter of '63-'64, his regiment re-enlisted, and he

37

spent his month's leave of absence at home. Here he became acquainted with. a young lady of whom his letters were thereafter full. She was the loveliest and the sweetest of her sex, of course, and as he was a handsome and agreeable young officer, I was not surprised to learn that she was also the kindest, and had consented to be his Lottie as soon as the war was over. Soon after his return to the army, his regiment was ordered into service under General Grant. He was made a staff officer, and served with credit and without a scratch or a day's illness till after the surrender of Lee, and the flight of Jeff Davis. His regiment was presently discharged, and he returned to New England almost as proud and happy as his family and his Lottie..

In the first year of their marriage my cousin and his wife were visiting friends in Charlestown, Mass. They had intended to leave upon a certain evening, but were urged and induced to remain till morning. They retired to a room upon the third story, and lay down to sleep as tranquilly as you or I, reader, expect to this night. About twelve o'clock, the wife was roused by a shout of "Whoa! Whoa!" She awoke to see her husband leap through the window, which she reached in time to see him crushed into a shapeless mass upon the pavement. Who can measure her agony at that sight? The lower half of his body was paralyzed, and he was left almost helpless-a mere wreck of what was so lately a handsome, stalwart man. It seems he had been dreaming that he was sitting in the front room of a little house in Virginia, occupied at one time by the General on whose staff he had been, and that he saw a horse running away. As the long windows opened upon the veranda, he jumped up to stop the animal, and sprang through the

window-to awaken as he felt himself falling, and in an instant crushed on the pitiless stones. Thus he, whom a double term of active service in the army had left unharmed, was instantly maimed for life by a baneful dream.

I wonder if anybody has noticed any difference of style in this story of John Tarbell. It is copied, with some omissions, from an article published in The Advance of Chicago, March 2, 1871, and is interesting to me as the first writing for which I received pay. I may add that it filled three columns of a blanket sheet, and the amount I got was three dollars. I went right on with my teaching.

I looked at my underclothes today and found them full of lice.

It was a bitter day when I discovered that I was not exempt from an evil all marching flesh is heir to.

I happened to be in Col. Cowdin's tent

COL. ROBERT COWDIN

when some people from Boston were visiting him and he was showing them a bullethole in a coat he was not wearing. He held the coat in one hand and pointed with the other. "There," he said, "is what made me the trouble." He was looking, not at the coat, but, as was fitting enough, at a very pretty girl in the party, so he did

not see what all the rest of us saw, that just where he was pointing a big, fat, white pediculus vestimenti was crawling. The visitors laughed, but to me it seemed an awful thing. When I got back to my tent I told Phillips about it, and he amazed me by declaring there wasn't a man in the regiment, officer or private, whose coat would not exhibit the same sort of inhabitants. "Count me out of that," I replied indignantly: "my clothes are all fresh and clean." "You had better examine them," he said significantly. I would not let him. know that I did so, but the more I thought about it the more I became conscious of certain sensations of the epidermis that I had ascribed to other causes, and I thought I should be more comfortable if I assured myself I was exempt. So I went away from camp, crawled over a fence, and when I was sure I was unobserved I pulled my shirt over my head. The broad blue expanse was uninhabited. "There," I exclaimed triumphantly, "I knew it couldn't be so!"

But the shirt was of thick wool with wide seams, and when I turned over the first seam I felt as if I should faint. There they were, big and little and nits, a garrison. of them. I had had blue days since I enlisted, but this was the first time I wished I had staid at home. Must I endure this sort of thing for three years? I made sure the present generation were extinct, and went back to camp a sadder and a wiser boy. I never got so that I could sit in front of my tent and do my (k)nitting as indifferently as a Spanish beggar cleans her daughter's head at the entrance to a cathedral, but I made my daily pilgrimages to secluded spots and reduced the infection to a minimum. Afterward when I tented alone I succeeded in tenting entire

Sept. 8, 1862]

39

ly alone except for now and then a straggler soon disposed of: even then eternal vigilance was the price of solitude; but on the march they were as impossible to escape as fleas in Rome. Sometimes even in camp a man would draw an entirely fresh suit, go out in the field, strip, burn his old clothes, put on his new ones, come back to camp, and find as many as ever upon him the next morning. John D. Billings says that he heard the orderly of a company officer tell of picking 52 graybacks from the shirt of his chief at one sitting.

Jacob Cole of the 57th N. Y., whose "Under Five Commanders" (Paterson, 1906) gives recollections that are cleanoutlined, says: "The following incident is an actual fact. An officer of the 57th was leading his men into a battle and at a certain point came under a fire of grape and canister. A charge was made, and this gallant officer, for such he was, ran out in front of his men, raised his sword high in air with his strong right arm, cheered and led on his men, but his left hand had unconsciously gotten under his right arm and was there digging away with sufficient energy to divert the attention of his company he led from the hail of grape and canister that greeted them."

Marching in the early dawn from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania I happened to see Gen. Burnside just getting up from a little sleep in an improvised camp near the road: for under Grant even generals did not always sleep luxuriously. He was a distressful looking object. His face was dirty, the whiskers to which he gave the name were unkempt, his clothes were bespattered, the stars on his shoulder-straps were dimmed, and though I have no statistics I will guarantee that if every living thing buttoned up under his muddy blue coat had been a

GEN. AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE, 1824-81

soldier, Gen. Burnside would have been pretty nearly a regiment.

I am quite aware that the subject is a loathsome one, but I am telling my army experiences as they were, without rose water, and to every old soldier this is a crawly remembrance. Of course it must be remembered that I joined my regiment just as it had finished a long campaign. The quartermaster had not yet dealt out fresh clothing, and many of the men possessed only a single ragged shirt. Chaplain Cudworth says many of them had not changed or washed their clothing since they left Harrison's Landing six weeks before; having been on the move or held in expectation of a move ever since. This was no reflection on them. The 1st Royal Muster Fusiliers were very proud of the name "Dirty Shirts", because in 1805 during the siege of Bhurtpore they were complimented by Gen. Lake for working in the trenches till their linen was anything but clean. "My men," he said, "your appearance does you honor. You have sacrificed personal comfort to the duty you owe your country."

The confederates were much worse off than we. Carlton McCarthy in his "Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia" (Richmond, 1882), a book so frank and accurate that I shall