It was on Wednesday that my architectural steed, the Gothic Pegasus, renewed his usual weekly journey to desolated Accomac, cheerfully conveying me thither at a speed that did not keep the same roadside house in view more than half an hour at a time. Having hitched the funereal stallion to a copy of Senator Sumner's recent Faneuil Hall speech, believing that document sufficiently heavy to hold him, I gave him a discarded straw-hat of mine for his dinner, and strolled into the Mackerel camp.
To the everlasting disgrace of our rulers be it said, my boy, I found the devoted Mackerel Brigade progressing
toward deep suffering at a rate which made me thank Heaven that I owned no chickens within sight of the harrowing scene. Being thoughtlessly supplied with three days' rations at a time, these neglected martyrs incur all the perils of suffocation and cruel nightmare by doing nothing on the first day but eat from morning till night, what is left over at midnight being used to pelt each other with. Then for two whole days these gallant men who are fighting our battles find famine staring them in the face, and I actually heard one emaciated Mackerel chap offering a whole week's pay to another Mackerel chap for a Confederate cracker which he had picked up in a field, wishing to consign that cracker to his friends at home as a sample of the unnatural food with which an ungrateful Republic feeds its faithful soldiers. I even found many Mackerels without knapsacks and blankets, which they had lost in adventures at "Old Sledge"; and there was that in the countenances of others which sured me that their poor faces had not been washed since the commencement of the war!
My soul turns sick at these things, my boy, and they even have an effect upon a beholder's stomach. To think that our noble volunteers, our country's preservers, should be subjected to sufferings in which they have not even the poor consolation of knowing that somebody else than themselves is responsible therefor.
Reflectively I turned from the scene of agony, and had rambled some fifteen minutes in an adjacent bit of woods, when the sound of voices near by made me
stop short behind a tree and peer eagerly through an opening in the nearest thicket.
Seated just beyond some evergreen bushes were four dilapidated Confederacies, solemnly discussing the great Emancipation Proclamation of our Honest Abe; whilst close by them, and astride of a mossy stone, was the accomplished swordsman, Captain Munchausen, frantically, and with many hiccups, endeavoring at one and the same time to catch a phantom fly and maintain his equestrian position.
One of the Confederacies took a bite from a cold potato which he held in his hand, and, says he:
"I reckon that it's near time for the unsubjugated South to adopt Retaliatory measures, and proclaim that all prisoners hereafter taken by the Confederacy shall be previously shot and made into bone-ornaments."
Here Captain Munchausen burst into an unseemly peal of laughter as he made another wild clutch at the phantom-fly, and says he: