Notwithstanding the absence of my friend Steed the supply of pie that day was short, and with a degree of self-denial, for which I can not now account, I asked for none. A soldier next me at the table, however, filed his application and when our winsome waitress returned, she handed the desert to me and left my neighbor pieless. I could not recall her fair young face as one I had ever seen before, and I had always been noted for my lack of personal comeliness. I was at a loss therefore to understand why the unsolicited discrimination in my favor had been made. A few minutes later the problem was solved. Standing on the porch after the meal had ended, this self-same maiden approached me a little timidly and asked, "When did you hear from your brother Sammie?" She and my younger brother, it seemed, had been schoolmates, and, as I learned afterwards, "sweethearts" as well, and the pie business was no longer a mystery.
If she still lives as maid or matron and this sketch should meet her eye, it gives me pleasure to assure her that the fragrance of her kindly deed though based upon no merit of my own, still lingers lovingly in my memory, like the echo of "faint, fairy footfalls down blossoming ways."
OUR CAMP POET.
"Dropping into poetry" has not been a peculiarity confined to that singular creation of Dickens' fancy, "Silag Wegg." While not a contagious disease, it is said that a majority of men suffer from it at some period in life. Like measles and whooping cough it usually comes early, is rarely fatal and complete recovery, as a rule, furnishes exemption from further attacks, without vaccination. Under these conditions it is but natural that the Oglethorpes should have had a poet in their ranks. In fact we had two, James E. Wilson and W. J. Steed, who has already figured somewhat in these memories, and who was called Phunie, for short. The latter was, however, only an ex-poet, not ex-officio, nor ex-cathedra, but ex-post facto. His attack had been light, very light, a sort of poetical varioloid. He had recovered and so far as the record shows, there had been no relapse. On the first appearance of the symptoms he had mounted his "Pegasus," which consisted of a stack of barrels in rear of his father's barn, and after an hour's mental labor, he rose and reported progress, but did not ask leave to sit again. The results are summed up in the following poetic gem:
"Here sits Phunie on a barrel,
With his feet on another barrel."
He has always claimed that while the superficial reader might find in these lines an apparent lack of artistic finish, with some possible defects as to metre and an unfortunate blending of anapestic and iambic verse, the rhyme was absolutely perfect. I have been unable to discover in them the rhythmic and liquid cadence that marks Buchannan Reade's "Drifting," or the perfection in measure attributed by Poe to Byron's "Ode" to his sister, yet my tender regard for my old comrade disinclines me to take issue with him as to the merits of this, the sole offspring of his poetic genius. My inability to find it in any collection of poetical quotations has induced me to insert it here with the hope of rescuing it from a fate of possibly undeserved oblivion.
Jim Wilson's case was different. His was a chronic attack. "He lisped in numbers for the numbers came." As a poet he was not only a daisy, but, as Tom Pilcher would say, he was a regular geranium. I regret that my memory has retained, with a single exception, only fragments of his many wooings of the muse.
A young lady friend, Miss Eve, of Nashville, asked from Jim a christening contribution to an album she had just purchased. He was equal to the occasion. The man and the hour had met. He was in it from start to finish. He filled every page in the book with original verse. I recall now only the following stanza:
"Newton, the man of meditation,
The searcher after hidden cause,
Who first discovered gravitation
And ciphered out attractions laws,
Could not, with all his cogitation,
Find rules to govern woman's jaws."
But his special forte was parody. A competitive examination was ordered at Thunderbolt in '63 to fill the position of second sergeant in the company. After studying Hardee's Tactics for a week Jim relieved his feelings in the following impromptu effort: