length of it and extract the root, after reducing it
to a reminiscence, was the wise plan of the powers early in the year
1862. To march an army of preponderous strength through level
and fertile country, flanked by friendly war-ships and backed by
unassailable credit; to meet and overcome a much smaller and far less
rich army, intrenched behind earthworks of doubtful formidableness, and
finally to besiege and capture an isolated city of more historic than
strategic advantages, seemed on the face of it as easy as rolling a
barrel downhill or eating when hungry. But the level, fertile country
was discovered to be very muddy, its supply of rain from heaven
unparalleled in nature, its streams as deadly as arsenic, and its
topography utterly different from that assigned to it in any known
geography. Furthermore, in its woods, and it was nearly all woods, dwelt
far more mosquitos than there are lost souls in Hades, and each mosquito
had a hollow spike in his head through which he not only could but would
squirt, with or without provocation, the triple compound essence of
malaria into veins brought up on oxygen, and on water through which you
could see the pebbles at the bottom. A bosom friend of the mosquito,
and some say his paramour, was little Miss Tick. Of the two she was
considerably the more hellish, and forsook her dwelling-places in the
woods for the warm flesh of soldiers where it is rosiest, next the skin.
The body, arms, and legs of Miss Tick could be scratched to nothing by
poisonous finger-nails, but her detached head was eternal, and through
eternity she bit and gnawed and sometimes laughed in the hollow of her
black soul. For the horses, mules, and cattle there were shrubs which
disagreed with them, and gigantic horse-flies. And for the general at
the head of the vast body of irritation there was an opposing army
whose numbers he overrated, and whose whereabouts he kept discovering
suddenly. It is said that during the Peninsular campaign the buzzards
were so well nourished that they raised a second brood.

While the army was still in the vicinity of Fort Monroe, numbers of
officers secured leave to ride over to Newport News and view the traces
of the recent and celebrated naval fight, which was to relegate wooden
battle-ships to the fireplace. Aladdin was among those to go. At this
time he was in great spirits, for it had been brought home to him
that he was one of the elect, one of those infinitely rare and g