class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 20]"/> two of us walked two miles to get) and water. Of the latter, we had plenty in canteens borrowed from the boys. We had a bully time, and we kept it up late. Then we went to bed in our cosy bunk and slept like graven images till reveille next morning. Thus we were housed for the winter—“under our own vine and fig tree,” so to speak.

Most of the other houses were built after the same general style. We bragged that we had the best house in camp, and were very chesty about it. Others did likewise.

The men’s quarters ready, we at once set to work on stables for the horses, of which there were about seventy, belonging to the Battery. All hands were called in to do this work. We scattered through the woods, cut logs and carried them on our shoulders to the spot selected. We built up walls around three sides, leaving the fourth or sunny side open. Then we cut logs into three or four foot lengths and split them into slabs, and with these slabs, as a rough sort of shingle, covered the roof and weighted them down, in place, with long, heavy logs laid across each row of slabs. Then we mixed mud and stopped up the cracks in the log walls. Altogether, we had a good, strong wind and rain-proof building, which was an effective shelter for the horses and in which they kept dry and comfortable through the winter—which was a cold and stormy one. All the men worked hard, and we soon had the stable finished, and the horses housed. Thus our building work was done, and we settled into the regular routine of camp life.

Perhaps a little sketch of our life in winter quarters, how we lived, how we employed ourselves, and what we did to pass away the time, may be interesting. I will try to give you some account of all that.

Of course, we all had our military duties to attend to regularly. The drivers had to clean, feed, water, and exercise the horses, and keep the stables in order. The “cannoneers” had to keep the guns clean, bright, and ready for service any minute—also they had to stand guard at the guns on the hill all the time, and over the camp, at night, to guard the forage, and look after things generally. We had to drill some every day—police the camp and keep the roads near the camp in order. To this day’s work we were called, every morning at six o’clock, by the bugler blowing the reveille. I may mention the fact that Prof. Francis Nicholas Crouch, the composer of the famous and beautiful song, “Kathleen Mavourneen,” was the bugler of our Battery, and he was the heartless wretch who used to persecute us that way. To be waked up and hauled out about day dawn on a cold, wet, dismal morning, and to have to hustle out and stand shivering at roll call, was about the most exasperating item of the soldier’s life. The boys had a song very expressive of a soldier’s feelings when nestling in his warm blankets, he heard the malicious bray of that bugle. It went like this:

“Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning;
Oh, how I’d like to remain in bed.
But the saddest blow of all is to hear the bugler call,
‘You’ve got to get up, you’ve got to get up,
You’ve got to get up this morning!’

“Some day I’m going to murder that bugler;
Some day they’re going to find him dead.
I’ll amputate his reveille,
And stamp upon it heavily,
And spend the rest of my life in bed!”

We didn’t kill old Crouch—I don’t know why, except that he was protected by a special providence, which sometimes permits such evil deeds to go unpunished. We used to hope that he would blow his own brains out, through his bugle, but he didn’t—he lived many years after the war.