Colonel George Humphreys, Eighty-eighth Indiana, whom I supposed to be a full-blooded Hoosier, tells me he is a Scotchman, and was born in Ayrshire, in the same house in which Robert Burns had birth. His grandfather, James Humphreys, was the neighbor and companion of the poet. It was of him he wrote this epitaph, at an ale-house, in the way of pleasantry:
| "Below these stanes lie Jamie's banes. |
| O! Death, in my opinion, |
| You ne'er took sic a blither'n bitch |
| Into thy dark dominion." |
30. This afternoon called on General Thomas; met General R. S. Granger; paid my respects to General Negley, and stopped for a moment at General Rousseau's. The latter was about to take a horseback ride with his daughter, to whom I was introduced.
MAY, 1863.
1. The One Hundred and Thirteenth Ohio is at Franklin. Colonel Wilcox has resigned; Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell will succeed to the colonelcy. I rode over the battle-field with the latter this afternoon.
4. Two men from Breckenridge's command strayed into our lines to-day.
7. Colonels Hobart, Taylor, Nicholas, and Captain Nevin spent the afternoon with me.
The intelligence from Hooker's army is contradictory and unintelligible. We hope it was successful, and yet find little beside the headlines in the telegraphic column to sustain that hope. The German regiments are said to have behaved badly. This is, probably, an error. Germans, as a rule, are reliable soldiers. This, I think, is Carl Schurz's first battle; an unfortunate beginning for him.