A CHANGE OF BASE.
For some weeks rumors, or "grape vine" bulletins, as they were called, had been afloat in camp that our regiment was to be transferred to coast service. To boys reared in the milder climate of Georgia the taste we were having of a Virginia winter rendered these rumors very palatable. And when, on Nov. 21, orders came to break camp we felt rather confident that we were bidding a long farewell to "Traveler's Repose" and Northwest Virginia, and were off for Georgia. The baggage wagons, of which the 1st Ga. had at that stage of the war, enough, in Gen. Loring's opinion, to equip a division, were loaded and went their way. All the afternoon we lay around the dismantled camp awaiting order to "follow pursuit," as a friend of mine once said, but they failed to come. Night settled down cold and cheerless, with our tents and blankets ten miles away, and we had to make the best of it. My bedfellow and I slept on an oilcloth, covered with an overcoat, and tied our four feet up together in a flannel shirt. Next day we crossed Allegheny Mountain and after three days' march, buoyed with the hope of spending the winter under a warmer sun, we reluctantly turned our faces Northward again, with the feeling in our hearts if not voiced upon our lips,
"O, ever thus from childhood's hour
I've seen my fondest hopes decay."
After a week's march my feet grew very sore and as I limped through Harrisonburg, a sweet-faced Virginia matron, with music in her voice and the light of heaven in her eye, beckoned to me from the window where she was sitting and gave me a nice pair of woollen socks. Passing through Newtown, Middletown, Kernstown and a number of other towns in a section made famous afterwards by Jackson's Valley Campaign, we reached Winchester Dec. 8, 1861. A few days later a supply of blankets contributed by the good ladies of Augusta, was received by the Oglethorpes. One of the contributors had no blankets, and in lieu of them, donated a handsome crumb-cloth, which like Joseph's coat, was of many colors, red and green being the prevailing tints. In the distribution this fell to Elmore Dunbar, the wag of the Company. Not needing it as a blanket he took it to a tailor in Winchester, had it transformed into a full suit, cap, coat and pants, and donning it had an innumerable company of gamins, white and black, following in his wake all over the town.
He and Harrison Foster were messmates. There was no discount on either of them as soldiers. Enlisting at the first call to arms, they were always among the first to toe the line at every beat of the longroll and in the closing months of the war, when hope of success had well nigh passed and so many were dropping by the wayside, they held out bravely and manfully to the end. But as cooks they were not a brilliant success. One evening Harrison had gathered a few brush to make a fire, when he called on Dunbar to assist in his preparations for the evening meal, an appeal, to which the latter failed to respond. "Well," said Harrison, "if you don't help, I'll swear I won't cook any supper." "All right," said Dunbar, "My supper's cooked," and fishing out of his coattail pocket an antiquated biscuit of uncertain age, he began to nibble. "Well," said Harrison, "I won't build any fire. You'll have to freeze," and Dunbar gently drew from his haversack an old-fashioned silk beaver hat, that he had worn in the march up the valley and quietly placed it on the fire as his contribution to the evening's comfort.
A SOLILOQUY—(NOT HAMLET'S.)
Among the original members enlisting with the Oglethorpes, was one H— H—, who, in civil life, was so scrupulously careful with his dress that in these latter days he would have passed a creditable examination as a dude. Camp life is not specially conducive to personal neatness and eight month's service had left to him on this line only the memory of better days. Returning from Winchester one night in a condition not promotive of mental equilibrium, he failed to find his tent and spent the night around the camp fire. He awoke next morning with his head in a camp kettle and his clothing soiled and blackened by contact with the cooking utensils, that had been his only bed-fellows. Running his hand through his matted locks and surveying his discolored uniform he was overheard to indulge in the following soliloquy: "Is this the gay and fascinating H— H—, that once perambulated the streets of Augusta in faultless attire? When I think of what I am and what I used to was, I feel myself blamed badly treated without sufficient cause."
"LIABLE TO DISAPPINTMENTS."
On a Saturday afternoon in my boyhood days, in company with a schoolmate, I was rambling through the woods in the enjoyment of the hebdomadal relief from the restraints of the school room and the unpalatable mysteries of the three R's taught with a hickory attachment. Reaching a country bathinghouse half-filled with water and used by a neighboring colored Baptist church for baptismal purposes, we proceeded to draw off the water in order to catch the tadpoles that were enjoying their otium cum dignitate on its mud-lined bottom. On the next day the preacher and congregation assembled at the place to administer the rite of baptism to a number of applicants for membership. Owing to our tadpole hunt of the preceding day, they found that unlike the place mentioned in the Scriptures, there was not "much water there," and they were compelled to defer the ceremony to a more convenient season. In dismissing the congregation the colored brother took occasion to remark that "We are liable, brethren, to disappintments in this life." On Christmas day in '61, in our camp, near Winchester, the mess to which the writer belonged found sad occasion to verify the truth if not the orthography of our dusky brother's observation. With a laudable desire to celebrate the day in appropriate style we had arranged with a colored caterer to supply our mess table with the proverbial turkey and such other adjuncts as the depleted condition of our financial bureau would permit. The day dawned and in the early morning hours our appetites for the coming feast were whetted by an eggnog kindly furnished the entire company by Lieut. J. V. H. Allen. The Christmas sun passed its meridian and traveled on toward its setting with no Joshua to stay its course. The appointed dinner hour came, as all appointed times do, but the proverbial turkey came not, with adjuncts or without. With our gastronomic hopes knocked finally into pi, but not mince pie, we sat down at last to our hardtack and bacon, lamenting in our hearts the uncertainty of "aught that wades, or soars, or shines beneath the stars." Whether the roost, from which our caterer expected to supply our larder was too well guarded on the preceding night, or whether the rating given our mess by the commercial agencies was unsatisfactory has remained through all these years an unsolved problem.