pointed to the outfit, and said:

"Colonel, in that box lie the remains of a colored cook. The chaplain
has appointed me to conduct the funeral service, and I find that the two
colored men on the cart are the only ones to accompany the remains to
their last resting place. No man can successfully run a funeral on three
niggers, one of whom is dead, one liable to go to sleep any minute, and
the other with an abnormal appetite for hardtack. It is a disgrace
to civilization to give a dead man such a send off, and I want you to
detail me some men to see me through. I have loaded myself with some
interesting remarks befitting the occasion, and I do not want to fire
them off into space, with no audience except these two coons. Give me
some mourners and things, or I drop this funeral right where it is."

While I was speaking the general rode up to visit with the colonel,
with his staff, and the colonel came out with his undershirt on, and his
suspenders hanging down, and he and the general consulted for a minute,
and laughed a little, which I thought was disgraceful. Then the colonel
sent for the sergeant-major and told, him to detail all the company
cooks and officer's servants, to attend the funeral with me, and he said
I could divide them off into reliefs, letting a few be mourners at a
time. In the meantime, he said, I could move my procession off down
by the horse-doctor's quarter's, as he did not want it in front of his
tent. That reminded me that the horse-doctor had prescribed for the
deceased, and had given him condition powders, and I asked the colonel
to compel the horse-doctor to go with me. It had always seemed to me at
home that the attending physician, under whose auspices the person died,
should attend the funeral of his patient, and when I told the colonel
about it, he called the horse-doctor and told him he would have to
go. It took half an hour or so to get the colored cooks and servants
together, but when all was ready to move, it was quite a respectable
funeral, except that I could not help noticing a spirit of levity on
the part of the mourners. All the followers were mounted, the officer's
servant's on officer's horses, and the cooks on mules, and it required
all the presence of mind I possessed to keep the coons from turning the
sad occasion into a horse race, as they would drop back, in squads, a
quarter of a mile or so, and then come whooping up to the cart containing
the remains, and each vowing that