the doctor would take each soldier into a private room, feel of
his pulse, look at his tongue, and say that what he needed was rest, and
give him some powders to be taken in wafers, or in sugar. But all he did
was to say "What's the matter?" and the sick man would tell him, when
the doctor would tell his assistant to give the man something, and pass
on to the next. I was the last one to be served, and the interview was
about as follows:

Doc.--What's the matter?

Me--Bilious.

Doc.--Run out your tongue. Take a swallow out of the black bottle.

That seems very simple, indeed, but it nearly killed me. When he told me
to run out my tongue, I run out perhaps six inches of the lower end of
it, the doctor glanced at it as though it was nothing to him anyway, and
then he told me to take a swallow out of the bottle. In all my life I
had never taken four doses of medicine, and when I did the medicine was
disguised in preserves or something. The hospital steward handed me the
bottle that a dozen other sick soldiers had drank out of, and it was
sticky all around the top, and contained something that looked like
castor oil, for greasing a buggy. He told me to take a good big swallow,
and I tried to do so. Talk about the suffering brought on by the war, it
seems to me nobody ever suffered as I did, trying to drink a swallow
of that castor oil out of a two quart bottle, that was dirty. It run so
slow that it seemed, an age before I got enough to swallow, and then it
seemed another age before the oil could pass a given point in my neck.
And great Caesar's ghost how it _did_ taste. I think it went down my
neck, and I just had strength enough to ask the steward to give me
something to take the taste out of my mouth. He handed me a blue pill.
O, I could have killed him. I rushed to the chaplain's tent and took a
drink of blackberry brandy, and my life was saved, but for three years
after that I was never sick enough to get farther than the chaplain's
quarters.

[Illustration: Great Caesar's ghost how it did taste 049]

I suppose the meanest trick that was ever played on a raw recruit, was
played on me while we were in camp at that place. It seemed to me
that some of the boys got jealous of me, because I had become a hero,
accidentally. May be some of them did not believe I had killed as many
of the enemy as I had owned up to having killed. Anyway every little
while some soldier would say that he thought it was a mean man that
wou