“You only gave us one hundred bushels of potatoes; how long did you think they would last?”
“About a month I thought.”
“We have ten companies of one hundred men each. Every company got ten bushels. That divided among one hundred men would only give them about two messes apiece.”
“That is so,” I confessed with some confusion.
“I see,” he continued, “that you are not accustomed to feeding armies.”
“If that is the way they eat, I don’t want the task of feeding them. I accept your explanation, and beg you to excuse my ignorance in these matters.”
And so we parted. I had a few minutes later, as the boys gathered about me at the landing, the privilege of explaining why they did not get more than two or three messes of potatoes,—that there were too many of them. That if there had been ten men and one hundred bushels of potatoes, instead of one thousand men and one hundred bushels of potatoes, they would have fared better.
SAVED BY LEMONADE.
THE many-colored signal lights of the fleet of steamers at Milliken’s Bend, and the bright camp-fires on the land, that glowed with such unwonted splendor in the gloaming, soon all faded out of sight as our boat steamed away toward St. Louis; and soon the black curtain of night shut us in with its thick heavy folds like a funeral pall, and our fight with disease and death began in earnest.