"LIABLE TO DISAPPINTMENTS."
On a Saturday afternoon in my boyhood days, in company with a schoolmate, I was rambling through the woods in the enjoyment of the hebdomadal relief from the restraints of the school room and the unpalatable mysteries of the three R's taught with a hickory attachment. Reaching a country bathinghouse half-filled with water and used by a neighboring colored Baptist church for baptismal purposes, we proceeded to draw off the water in order to catch the tadpoles that were enjoying their otium cum dignitate on its mud-lined bottom. On the next day the preacher and congregation assembled at the place to administer the rite of baptism to a number of applicants for membership. Owing to our tadpole hunt of the preceding day, they found that unlike the place mentioned in the Scriptures, there was not "much water there," and they were compelled to defer the ceremony to a more convenient season. In dismissing the congregation the colored brother took occasion to remark that "We are liable, brethren, to disappintments in this life." On Christmas day in '61, in our camp, near Winchester, the mess to which the writer belonged found sad occasion to verify the truth if not the orthography of our dusky brother's observation. With a laudable desire to celebrate the day in appropriate style we had arranged with a colored caterer to supply our mess table with the proverbial turkey and such other adjuncts as the depleted condition of our financial bureau would permit. The day dawned and in the early morning hours our appetites for the coming feast were whetted by an eggnog kindly furnished the entire company by Lieut. J. V. H. Allen. The Christmas sun passed its meridian and traveled on toward its setting with no Joshua to stay its course. The appointed dinner hour came, as all appointed times do, but the proverbial turkey came not, with adjuncts or without. With our gastronomic hopes knocked finally into pi, but not mince pie, we sat down at last to our hardtack and bacon, lamenting in our hearts the uncertainty of "aught that wades, or soars, or shines beneath the stars." Whether the roost, from which our caterer expected to supply our larder was too well guarded on the preceding night, or whether the rating given our mess by the commercial agencies was unsatisfactory has remained through all these years an unsolved problem.