[45] done,though they are in a place so veiled in woods that either rising or setting sun will find it hard to spy them. We have now a good regimental hospital, admirably arranged in a deserted gin-house,--a fine well of our own digging, within the camp lines,--a full allowance of tents, all floored,--a wooden cook-house to every company, with sometimes a palmetto mess-house beside,--a substantial wooden guard-house, with a fireplace five feet “in de clar,” where the men off duty can dry themselves and sleep comfortably in bunks afterwards. We have also a great circular school-tent, made of condemned canvas, thirty feet in diameter, and looking like some of the Indian lodges I saw in Kansas. We now meditate a regimental bakery. Our aggregate has increased from four hundred and ninety to seven hundred and forty, besides a hundred recruits now waiting at St. Augustine, and we have practised through all the main movements in battalion drill. Affairs being thus prosperous, and yesterday having been six weeks since my last and only visit to Beaufort, I rode in, glanced at several camps, and dined with the General. It seemed absolutely like re-entering the world; and I did not fully estimate my past seclusion till it occurred to me, as a strange and novel phenomenon, that the soldiers at the other camps were white.
January 8, 1863.
This morning I went to Beaufort again, on necessary business, and by good luck happened upon a review and drill of the white regiments.
The thing that struck me most was that same absence of uniformity, in minor points, that I noticed at first in my own officers.
The best regiments in the Department are represented among 