s were in a little brick schoolhouse of one story,
which stood (and I think still stands) on the east side of the track
close to the railway. My improvised camp equipage consisted of a
common trestle cot and a pair of blankets, and I made my bed in the
open space in front of the teacher's desk or pulpit. My only staff
officer was an aide-de-camp, Captain Bascom (afterward of the
regular army), who had graduated at an Eastern military school, and
proved himself a faithful and efficient assistant. He slept on the
floor in one of the little aisles between the pupils' seats. One
lesson learned that night remained permanently fixed in my memory,
and I had no need of a repetition of it. I found that, having no
mattress on my cot, the cold was much more annoying below than above
me, and that if one can't keep the under side warm, it doesn't
matter how many blankets he may have atop. I procured later an army
cot with low legs, the whole of which could be taken apart and
packed in a very small parcel, and with this I carried a small
quilted mattress of cotton batting. It would have been warmer to
have made my bed on the ground with a heap of straw or leaves under
me; but as my tent had to be used for office work whenever a tent
could be pitched, I preferred the neater and more orderly interior
which this arrangement permitted. This, however, is anticipating.
The comfortless night passed without much refreshing sleep, the
strange situation doing perhaps as much as the limbs aching from
cold to keep me awake. The storm beat through broken window-panes,
and the gale howled about us, but day at last began to break, and
with its dawning light came our first reveille in camp. I shall
never forget the peculiar plaintive sound of the fifes as they
shrilled out on the damp air. The melody was destined to become very
familiar, but to this day I can't help wondering how it happened
that so melancholy a strain was chosen for the waking tune of the
soldiers' camp. The bugle reveille is quite different; it is even
cheery and inspiriting; but the regulation music for the drums and
fifes is better fitted to waken longings for home and all the sadder
emotions than to stir the host from sleep to the active duties of
the day. I lay for a while listening to it, finding its notes
suggesting many things and becoming a thread to string my reveries
upon, as I thought of the past which was separated from me by a
great gulf, the present with its serious