s reception of my remark was decidedly ungracious, and
I retired behind a log, while he made another attempt. This time he
caused a spark to alight on the charred cotton, but he forgot to blow it
while he looked around with a smile of triumph on his face, and when he
looked back at the spark there was none there. The mutterings and
suppressed laughter of the rest of us caused the chief to make some
emphatic remarks of a lurid nature, and, when I remarked that we
would wait while he went back to find the negro boy, he grew furious in
his denunciation of such ancient methods of procuring fire. Then I
suggested that the potatoes would spoil if he did not hurry up, dodging
down behind my log as he looked at me with anything but a loving glance.
He now made several careful attempts to locate another spark in the
tinder, but history did not repeat itself, and he got up, exclaiming,
hoarsely:

"I'll be everlastingly d----d if I know as much as a 10-year-old
nigger."

Glaring around him, he caught sight of my head above the log, striving
to suppress my laughter enough to utter some words of consolation, when
he violently threw the whole fire department at my head, saying:

"Damn you, Swiggett; I suppose I'll never hear the end of this!" and he
walked off by himself.

We ate our sweet potatoes raw, as no one cared to risk further failure
with the fire apparatus, and after a time our crestfallen chief came
back and joined us. Several remarks by the others about the delicacy of
baked sweet potatoes were noted by him, and a wild glare at the speakers
was the result. I remarked to Captain Gedney that the niggers were very
kindly, but that their education was sadly neglected, and that a man who
had not as much sense as a 10-year-old negro boy was not a remarkable
man.

"You fellows want to let up, or I'll kill some of you," remarked Fee,
and then, after the subject had been dropped for a time:

"Say, boys, what will you take to keep mum about this?"

After some bargaining, we finally agreed to keep his experience a
secret, and peace was restored; but we had not agreed to drop the
matter, and as long as we were together the captain would occasionally
see one of us sit down in a confident way and go through a pantomime in
which were reproduced his expressions and actions while trying to run
our fire department.

The same afternoon, while we were peacefully resting, in seeming
security, on the sunny side of the sloping bank of