the cars, writing his letters on the route from
Cairo to Chicago, where he mailed them.

No doubt at this time, while Carleton was writing so brilliantly to a
quarter of a million readers, many of them envied him his
opportunities. Distance lent enchantment to the view. "But let me
say," wrote Carleton, "if they were once brought into close contact
with all the dreadful realities of war,--if they were obliged to stand
the chances of getting their heads knocked off, or blown to atoms by
an unexpected shell, or bored through with a minie ball,--to stand
their chances of being captured by the enemy,--to live on bread and
water, and little of it, as all of the correspondents have been
obliged to do the past week,--to sleep on the ground, or on a sack of
corn, or in a barn, with the wind blowing a gale, and the snow
whirling in drifts, and the thermometer shrunk to zero,--and then,
after the battle is over and the field won, to walk among the dying
and the dead, to behold all the ghastly sights of trunkless heads and
headless trunks,--to see the human form mutilated, disfigured, torn,
and mangled by shot and shell,--to step in pools of blood,--to hear
all around sighs, groans, imprecations, and prayers from dying
men,--they would be content to let others become historians of the
war. But this is not all; a correspondent must keep ever in view the
thousands that are looking at the journal he represents, who expect
his account at the earliest possible moment. If he is behindhand, his
occupation is gone. His account must be first, or among the first, or
it is nothing. Day and night he must be on the alert, improving every
opportunity and turning it to account. If he loses a steamboat trip,
or a train of cars, or a mail, it is all up with him. He might as well
put his pencil in his pocket and go home."

Carleton had a hearty laugh over a letter from a friend who advised
him "to take more time and rewrite his letters," adding that it would
be for his benefit. To Carleton, who often wrote amid the smoke of
battle or on deck amid bursting shells, or while flying over the
prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of
all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of
calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and
finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when
writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston
was two hundr