on can picture
eatables and streams of running water, so plain that one will almost
reach for the eatables, or rush for the imaginary stream, to plunge in
and quench thirst, but I have experienced both of those sensations for
thirteen dollars a month, and nary a pension yet. It is such experiences
that bring gray hairs to the temples of young soldiers, and cause eyes
to become hollow and sunken in the head. Today, your Uncle Samuel has
not got silver dollars enough in his treasury to hire me to suffer one
day of such hunger as to make me see things that were not there, but
twenty-two years ago it was easy to have fun over it, and to laugh
it off the next day. When we stopped that day, at noon, to rest, the
company commissary sergeant came up to the company, with two men
carrying the hind quarter of an animal that had been slaughtered, and he
began to cut it up and issue it out to the men. It was peculiar looking
meat, but it was meat, and every fellow took his ration, and it was
not long before the smell of broiled fresh meat could be "heard" all
around. When I took my meat I asked the sergeant what it was, and where
he got it. I shall always remember his answer. It was this:

"Young man, when you are starving, and the means of sustaining life
are given you, take your rations and go away, and don't ask any fool
questions. If you don't want it, leave it."

Leave it? Egad, I would have eaten it if it had been a Newfoundland dog,
and I took it, and cooked it, and ate it. I do not know, and never did,
what it was, but when the quartermaster's mule teams pulled out after
dinner, there were two "spike teams;"--that is, two wheel mules and a
single leader, instead of four-mule teams. After I saw the teams move
out, each mule looking mournful, as though each one thought his time
might come next, I didn't want to ask any questions about that meat,
though I know there wasn't a beef critter within fifty miles of us. I
have had my children ask me, many times, if I ever eat any mule in the
army, and I have always said that I did not know. And I don't. But I am
a great hand to mistrust.

It was on this hungry day, when filled with meat such as I had never met
before that I did a thing I shall always regret. The captain came down
to the rear of the company and said, so we could all hear it. "I want
two men to volunteer for a perilous mission. I want two as brave men as
ever lived. Who will volunteer? Don't all speak at once. Take pl