r, though
the seat of the pants, and the knees, and the sleeves of the coat were
nearly gone, an orderly came through the company and said the regiment
would have a dismounted dress parade at sundown, and every man must wear
his new clothes. Ye gods! that was too much! If I could have had a week
or ten days to get used to those new clothes, one article at a time, I
could have stood it, but to be compelled to put the pants, and jacket,
shoes and hat on all at once, was horrible to think of, and if I had
not known that a deserter was always caught, and punished, I would have
deserted. But the clothes must be put on, and I must go out into the
world a spectacle to behold. Believing that it is better to face the
worst, and have it over, I put on the pants first. If I could ever meet
the army contractor who furnished those pants to a government almost in
the throes of dissolution, I would kill him as I would an enemy of the
human race. There was room enough in those pants for a man and a horse.
Yes, and a bale of hay. There were no suspenders furnished to the men,
and how to keep the pants from falling from grace was a question, but I
got a piece of tent rope, cut a hole in the waist band, and run the rope
around inside, and tied it around my waist, puckering the top of the
pants at proper intervals.

When I think of those pants now, after twenty-two years, I wonder that I
was not irretrievably lost in them. I would have been lost if I had not
stuck out of the top. But when I looked at the bottoms of the pants I
found at least a foot too much. If I had tied the rope around under my
arms, or buttoned them to my collar button, they would have been too
long at the bottom. I finally rolled them up at the bottom, and they
rolled clear up above my knees. But how they did bag around my body.
There was cloth enough to spare to have made a whole uniform for the
largest man in the regiment. At that time I was a slim fellow, that
weighed less than 125 pounds, and there is no doubt I got the largest
pair of pants that was issued in the whole Union army. I only had
a-small round mirror in my tent, so I could not see how awfully I
looked, only in installments, but to a sensitive young man who had
always dressed well, any one can see how a pair of such pants would
harrow up his soul. If the pants were too large, you ought to have
seen the jacket. The contractor who made the clothes evidently took the
measure of a monkey to make that jacket