was frequently aggravated by affections of the
bowels and throat. The number of persons that died with it was fabulous.
Some have gone so far as to say that the army could have better afforded
the slaughter of twenty thousand men, than the delay on the
Chickahominy. The embalmers were now enjoying their millennium, and a
steam coffin manufactory was erected at White House, where twenty men
worked day and night, turning out hundreds of pine boxes. I had,
occasion, in one of my visits to the depot, to repair to the tent of one
of the embalmers. He was a sedate, grave person, and when I saw him,
standing over the nude, hard corpse, he reminded me of the implacable
vulture, looking into the eyes of Prometheus. His battery and tube were
pulsing, like one's heart and lungs, and the subject was being drained
at the neck. I compared the discolored body with the figure of _Ianthe_,
as revealed in Queen Mab, but failed to see the beautifulness of death.

"If you could only make him breathe, Professor," said an officer
standing by.

The dry skin of the embalmer broke into chalky dimples, and he grinned
very much as a corpse might do:--

"Ah!" he said, "_then_ there would be money made."

To hear these embalmers converse with each other was like listening to
the witch sayings in Macbeth. It appeared that the arch-fiend of
embalming was a Frenchman named Sonca, or something of that kind, and
all these worthies professed to have purchased his "system." They told
grisly anecdotes of "operations," and experimented with chemicals, and
congratulated each other upon the fever. They would, I think, have piled
the whole earth with catacombs of stony corpses, and we should have no
more green graves, but keep our dead with us as household ornaments.

The negroes did not suffer with the fever, although their quarters were
close and filthy. Their Elysium had come; there was no more work. They
slept and danced and grinned, and these three actions made up the sum of
their existence. Such people to increase and multiply I never beheld.
There were scores of new babies every day; they appeared to be born by
twins and triplets; they learned to walk in twenty-four hours; and their
mothers were strong and hearty in less time. Such soulless, lost,
degraded men and women did nowhere else exist. The divinity they never
had; the human they had forgotten; they did no great wrongs,--thieving,
quarrelling, deceiving,--but they failed to do any rights, and