I must tell you, before I forget it, all about our crazy man. One of the fellows in my tent, who came out about two months ago, had evidently got tired of the service, and began to play crazy, for a discharge. He began to sleep all day, so as to be in good shape to lie awake all night. For two nights he kept us awake with his “Boots ten feet long,” “Man in the tent,” “Where am I?” “Who am I?” and such nonsense. When awake in the daytime he was continually hunting for horsehairs on his hands, and it was a decidedly interesting case of amateur lunacy. He couldn’t eat anything—so he said—but he managed to pack away a good quantity of grub on the sly. Well, he started in on his third night, and kept his twaddle going until midnight, when something happened. Dan’s Irish got the best of him and he could hold in no longer. He kicked off the blankets that covered us, elevated his heels, and fairly kicked the top bunk into kindling wood. The crazy man landed on the stove, and the wreckage was scattered all over the tent. Then old Dan. opened up with his tongue and gave our amateur lunatic Hail Columbia, Rule Britannia and Erin go Bragh, all rolled into one, and threatening to take him out and pitch him into the river if he didn’t become immediately and permanently sane. Dan’s treatment effected a complete and wonderful cure.
One of the old men of the regiment was married a short time ago to the daughter of an old planter living up country a short distance. The fellow was Pete Gravlin; the girl seventeen and very pretty; the parents rich. The old folks were dead set against any such arrangement, but Pete and the maiden were determined, so down to the Point he brought her and she became Mrs. Gravlin.
A collection has been taken up in this regiment for a fund to build a chapel. The human desire to outstrip our neighbors has made the “collection” a success. The Twelfth built one which cost $300, and now twice that sum has been raised in the Second, and we are congratulating ourselves, not upon the prospect of having a chapel, but upon the fact that it will be bigger than the Twelfth’s.
CXXIX
Point Lookout, Md., January 23, 1864.
I AM seated in the sutler’s shop at the prison camp with a whole ream of paper before me, waiting to be written over. The mail got in last night, for a wonder, on time. A warm spell has opened the ice in the river. I got a letter from Frank Morrill, and he writes me, “I want you to assume command of Frances and Nealie when you hear that I am coming home, meet me at the depot and escort me to the house.” [When he came, he came in his coffin, having received mortal wounds the following July.]
We have had a most delightful day, and the boys of Company I have been busy stockading their new Sibley tents. As soon as they move in I will have a post office tent all to myself, and I have got it in my mind now just how it will be rigged up for my business, even to the establishment of an art gallery, the nucleus of which I already have in a highly colored lithograph from a cigar box.
Sunday, January 24.
I am messing now with Hen. Everett, who is clerk for the Adjutant, and a fellow named Soseman. We do our own cooking, and as a consequence live better—much better-than we should if we depended entirely on the company cooks and rations. We have beefsteak, baked beans, fritters, and the best coffee on the Point, and gathered about our little mess table at the Adjutant’s quarters, envy no man his share of the good things of life.