Yesterday General Marston was relieved by General Hinks, and from this the boys look for an early transfer of the regiment to the front, as Marston will probably want us with him, while Hinks would naturally prefer his own old regiment, the Nineteenth Massachusetts. The paymaster is expected here day after tomorrow to make what will probably be the last payment we will receive in the southern country.
A drop of water comes through the tent occasionally and strikes this paper with unerring accuracy, but I am bound to write in spite of it. Jess. Dewey and I are going up the river for sea shells the first fair day. He is now “right general guide” for the regiment, and has his time to himself quite as much as I do, so there is nothing to stand in the way of our little expedition when the weather will permit. The Veteran Volunteers have returned from their furloughs, some of them completely “busted,” so far as finances are concerned.
Wednesday, April 6.
Orders have just come for our regiment to be ready to embark tomorrow morning. We are to take two days’ rations, and are going, probably, to either Norfolk or Yorktown. I may stay here a day or two, or may not, to look after the mail. The officers of the regiment have for some time been making great preparations for a grand ball to come off tomorrow night. It was to have been held in the chapel, and as it would not sound well to talk of a dance in the church, the affair, was designated as a “picnic.” But it is all the same now. Some of the officers do not relish the idea of leaving the quarters they have fitted up so comfortably and at considerable expense. Frank Wasley swears he will burn his when he has to leave it, orders to the contrary notwithstanding.
Bill Pendleton has been down to headquarters, and he says Gen. Marston says we are going to Norfolk, and that we will have an easier time than we are having here. Marston has been appointed military governor of Norfolk. As for myself, if I fare as well where we are going as I have here I will have no reason to complain.
CXXXIX
Yorktown, Va., April 11, 1864.
HERE I am again, only a couple miles from the spot where we camped two years ago. I have been looking around a little since we arrived here. Yesterday Hen. Everett, Jesse Dewey and I paid a visit to that old camp, and it was intensely interesting to us. The company streets and the ditches around the tents were there almost as we left them, and even much of the litter of the camp. I found the site of my tent and sat down on the very spot where, two years ago, I used to rest after a night in the trenches, and where the letters addressed to “Miss Nealie T. Lane” were written. I picked up one of the old tent-pins, and intend to make some little souvenir of it. Also a piece of shell and a fragment of boiler from the old Magruder sawmill, the music of which was continually in our ears.
Perhaps you remember about an old tentmate of mine named Damon. When we were here then he hollowed out an oven in the steep bank of a ravine, and as that was one of the institutions of Company I, we hunted it up. We found it in perfect condition and as good as new, and as we stood there Damon was right before my eyes again, bobbing about and learnedly discoursing on the peculiar advantages of ovens built on that peculiar plan.