AM VISITED BY MY FATHER
About this time my father paid me a visit. Rations were mighty scarce. I was mighty glad to see him, but ashamed to let him know how poorly off for something to eat we were. We were living on parched corn. I thought of a happy plan to get him a good dinner, so I asked him to let us go up to the colonel's tent. Says I, "Colonel Field, I desire to introduce you to my father, and as rations are a little short in my mess, I thought you might have a little better, and could give him a good dinner." "Yes," says Colonel Field, "I am glad to make the acquaintance of your father, and will be glad to divide my rations with him. Also, I would like you to stay and take dinner with me," which I assure you, O kind reader, I gladly accepted. About this time a young African, Whit, came in with a frying-pan of parched corn and dumped it on an old oil cloth, and said, "Master, dinner is ready." That was all he had. He was living like ourselves—on parched corn.
We continued to fortify and build breastworks at Chattanooga. It was the same drudge, drudge day by day. Occasionally a Sunday would come; but when it did come, there came inspection of arms, knapsacks and cartridge-boxes. Every soldier had to have his gun rubbed up as bright as a new silver dollar. W. A. Hughes had the brightest gun in the army, and always called it "Florence Fleming." The private soldier had to have on clean clothes, and if he had lost any cartridges he was charged twenty-five cents each, and had to stand extra duty for every cartridge lost. We always dreaded Sunday. The roll was called more frequently on this than any other day. Sometimes we would have preaching. I remember one text that I thought the bottom had been knocked out long before: "And Peter's wife's mother lay sick of fever." That text always did make a deep impression on me. I always thought of a young divine who preached it when first entering the ministry, and in about twenty years came back, and happening to preach from the same text again, an old fellow in the congregation said, "Mr. Preacher, ain't that old woman dead yet?" Well, that was the text that was preached to us soldiers one Sunday at Chattanooga. I could not help thinking all the time, "Ain't that old woman dead yet?" But he announced that he would preach again at 3 o'clock. We went to hear him preach at 3 o'clock, as his sermon was so interesting about "Peter's wife's mother lay sick of a fever." We thought, maybe it was a sort of sickly subject, and he would liven us up a little in the afternoon service.
Well, he took his text, drawled out through his nose like "small sweetness long drawn out:" "M-a-r-t-h-a, thou art w-e-a-r-i-e-d and troubled about many things, but M-a-r-y hath chosen that good part that shall never be taken from her." Well, you see, O gentle and fair reader, that I remember the text these long gone twenty years. I do not remember what he preached about, but I remember thinking that he was a great ladies' man, at any rate, and whenever I see a man who loves and respects the ladies, I think him a good man.
The next sermon was on the same sort of a text: "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam and took out of"—he stopped here and said e meant out of, that e, being translated from the Latin and Greek, meant out of, and took e, or rather out of a rib and formed woman. I never did know why he expaciated so largely on e; don't understand it yet, but you see, reader mine, that I remember but the little things that happened in that stormy epoch. I remember the e part of the sermon more distinctly than all of his profound eruditions of theology, dogmas, creeds and evidences of Christianity, and I only write at this time from memory of things that happened twenty years ago.