[8] “ Did you think that was more than you bargained for, my man?” His answer came promptly and stoutly,-- “I been a-tinking, Mas'r, dat's jess what I went for.” I thought this did well enough for my very first interchange of dialogue with my recruits.
November 27, 1862.
Thanksgiving-Day; it is the first moment I have had for writing during these three days, which have installed me into a new mode of life so thoroughly that they seem three years. Scarcely pausing in New York or in Beaufort, there seems to have been for me but one step from the camp of a Massachusetts regiment to this, and that step over leagues of waves.
It is a holiday wherever General Saxton's proclamation reaches.
The chilly sunshine and the pale blue river seem like New England, but those alone.
The air is full of noisy drumming, and of gunshots; for the prizeshooting is our great celebration of the day, and the drumming is chronic.
My young barbarians are all at play.
I look out from the broken windows of this forlorn plantation-house, through avenues of great live-oaks, with their hard, shining leaves, and their branches hung with a universal drapery of soft, long moss, like fringe-trees struck with grayness.
Below, the sandy soil, scantly covered with coarse grass, bristles with sharp palmettoes and aloes; all the vegetation is stiff, shining, semi-tropical, with nothing soft or delicate in its texture.
Numerous plantation-buildings totter around, all slovenly and unattractive, while the interspaces are filled with all manner of wreck and refuse, pigs, fowls, dogs, and omnipresent Ethiopian infancy.
All this is the 