knock the mule down with a neck-yoke, the animal had grabbed the
chaplain by the coat tail, with its mouth, taking some of his pants,
also, and perhaps a little skin, raised him up into the air, about seven
feet, let go of him, and tried to turn around and kick the good man on
the fly as he came down. We drove the mule away, rescued the chaplain,
tied his pants together with a piece of string, cut off the tail of his
coat which the mule had not torn off, so it was the same length as the
other one, and made him look quite presentable, though he said he _knew_
he could never ride a horse again. It seems that instead of reaching
into the nose bag, and taking a little corn, he had unbuckled the nose
bag and taken it off. I told him he was a hog, and ought to have
known better than take the nose bag off, thus leaving the mule's mouth
unmuzzled, while the animal was irritated. He accused me of knowing that
the mule was vicious, and deliberately sending him there to be killed,
so rather than have any hard feelings I gave him a handful of my parched
corn.

A few Sundays afterwards I heard him preach a sermon on the sin of
covetousness, and I thought how beautifully he could have illustrated
his sermon if he had turned around and showed his soldier audience where
the mule eat his coat tail. Soon we saddled up and marched another day
without food. Reader, were you ever so hungry that you could see, as
plain as though it was before you, a dinner-table set with a full meal,
roast beef, mashed potatoes, pie, all steaming hot, ready to sit down
to? If you have not been very hungry in your life, you can not believe
that one can be in a condition to see things. The man with delirium
tremens can see snakes, while the hungry man, in his delirium, can see
things he would like to eat. Many times during that day's ride through
the deserted pine-woods, with my eyes wide open, I could see no trees,
no ground, no horses and men around me, but there seemed a film over
the eyes, and through it I could see all of the good things I ever had
eaten. One moment there would be a steaming roast turkey, on a platter,
ready to be carved. Again I could see a kettle over a cook-stove, with a
pigeon pot-pie cooking, the dumpings, light as a feather, bobbing up and
down with the steam, and I could actually smell the odor of the cooking
pot-pie. It seems strange, and unbelievable to those who have never
experienced extreme hunger or thirst, that the imaginati