Resumed the march
early, found the river waist high, and current swift; but the men all got over
safely, and we reached camp at one o'clock.
The Third has been
assigned to a new brigade, to be commanded by Brigadier-General Dumont, of
Indiana.
The paymaster has
come at last.
Willis, my new
servant, is a colored gentleman of much experience and varied accomplishments.
He has been a barber on a Mississippi river steamboat, and a daguerreian
artist. He knows much of the South, and manipulates a fiddle with wonderful
skill. He is enlivening the hours now with his violin.
Oblivious to rain,
mud, and the monotony of the camp, my thoughts are carried by the music to
other and pleasanter scenes; to the cottage home, to wife and children, to a
time still further away when we had no children, when we were making the
preliminary arrangements for starting in the world together, when her cheeks
were ruddier than now, when wealth and fame and happiness seemed lying just
before me, ready to be gathered in, and farther away still, to a gentle,
blue-eyed mother—now long gone—teaching her child to lisp his first simple
prayer.
SOURCE: John
Beatty, The Citizen-soldier: Or, Memoirs of a Volunteer, pp. 77-8
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