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[21] he could speak no word of English; and 2d, because he was very deaf. Notwithstanding which little drawbacks, he ran about very briskly, from morn to eve, and really saw a great deal. I roared French in his ear, till I nearly had the bronchitis, but succeeded in imparting to him such information as I had. He addressed me as “Mon Colonel” and looked upon me as the hero of a hundred campaigns; though he did rather stick me, when he asked me whether our pontoons were constructed on the system of Peterhoff or of Smolenski! He was much pleased with the attention he got, and was extremely surprised when he beheld the soldiers all running to buy newspapers.

Yesterday came General Buford, commander of the second Cavalry Division, and held a pow-wow. He is one of the best of the officers of that arm and is a singular-looking party. Figurez-vous a compactly built man of middle height, with a tawny moustache and a little, triangular gray eye, whose expression is determined, not to say sinister. His ancient corduroys are tucked into a pair of ordinary cowhide boots, and his blue blouse is ornamented with holes; from one pocket thereof peeps a huge pipe, while the other is fat with a tobacco pouch. Notwithstanding this get — up he is a very soldierly looking man. He is of a good-natured disposition, but not to be trifled with. Caught a notorious spy last winter and hung him to the next tree, with this inscription: “This man to hang three days: he who cuts him down before shall hang the remaining time.”


September 24, 1863
Yesterday we were favored with the presence of Sir Henry Holland, the Queen's physician, who is one of the liveliest old birds for one of seventy-five that ever was seen. He travels two months every year, and has already


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