Major Wilder Dwight: January 28, 1862

Cantonment (?) Hicks, January 28, 1862.

I send you the above, clipped from yesterday's paper. It is a wonderfully accurate telegraphic despatch. It is a curiosity of correctness, a prodigy of precision. It states, too, all that I can hope to do for you by way of news. Yet I will not deny that the air is full of rumors, nor that our stay at Frederick is, very probably, to count itself by days rather than weeks.

This whole region of conjecture is so tracked and trodden by the impatient restlessness of camp life, that I consider it worth little. Yet I wish you to feel sure that, though “nothing of the least interest transpires,” we keep up a perturbed prophesying, which answers very well to spice and quicken this slow life. . . . .

I saw yesterday a writing-case that excited my envy. It rolls up very compactly; and, being composed of narrow and thin pieces of wood, a clamp holds them in place, and makes a tablet of the roll.

Will you get me a small one? as I hope to be reduced to a carpet-bag or a saddle-bag very often this summer. . . . .

I am going to do what I can to reduce living to its lowest terms; and I hope to be as movable as a small, country frame-house; which, I believe, is the most restless fixture of modern times.

SOURCE: Elizabeth Amelia Dwight, Editor, Life and Letters of Wilder Dwight: Lieut.-Col. Second Mass. Inf. Vols., p. 191