d of the young men leaped hot with eager
desire to accompany us. The older women, who remembered the dreadful
misery of war--the misery that presses its iron weight most heavily on
the wives and the little ones--looked sadly at us; but the young girls
drove down in bevies, arrayed in their finery, to wave flags in
farewell to the troopers and to beg cartridges and buttons as
mementos. Everywhere we saw the Stars and Stripes, and everywhere we
were told, half-laughing, by grizzled ex-Confederates that they had
never dreamed in the bygone days of bitterness to greet the old flag
as they now were greeting it, and to send their sons, as now they were
sending them, to fight and die under it.

It was four days later that we disembarked, in a perfect welter of
confusion. Tampa lay in the pine-covered sand-flats at the end of a
one-track railroad, and everything connected with both military and
railroad matters was in an almost inextricable tangle. There was no
one to meet us or to tell us where we were to camp, and no one to
issue us food for the first twenty-four hours; while the railroad
people unloaded us wherever they pleased, or rather wherever the jam
of all kinds of trains rendered it possible. We had to buy the men
food out of our own pockets, and to seize wagons in order to get our
spare baggage taken to the camping ground which we at last found had
been allotted to us.

Once on the ground, we speedily got order out of confusion. Under
Wood's eye the tents were put up in long streets, the picket-line of
each troop stretching down its side of each street. The officers'
quarters were at the upper ends of the streets, the company kitchens
and sinks at the opposite ends. The camp was strictly policed, and
drill promptly begun. For thirty-six hours we let the horses rest,
drilling on foot, and then began the mounted drill again. The
regiments with which we were afterward to serve were camped near us,
and the sandy streets of the little town were thronged with soldiers,
almost all of them regulars; for there were but one or two volunteer
organizations besides ourselves. The regulars wore the canonical dark
blue of Uncle Sam. Our own men were clad in dusty brown blouses,
trousers and leggings being of the same hue, while the broad-brimmed
soft hat was of dark gray; and very workmanlike they looked as, in
column of fours, each troop trotted down its company street to form by
squadron or battalion, the troopers sitting stead