[277]
breakfast.
“Yes, what did the confounded fools mean?”
added the pacific Humphreys.
But the most indignant personage was Rosencrantz.
“I do svear!”
he exclaimed, “this whole night have I not a single vink slept.
It is not enough that those sentry fellows should tell us vat time it is, but they must also be screaming to me a long speech besides!
Vat do I care vat time it is; and if all is vell, vy can they not keep it to themselves, and not be howling it in my ears and vaking me up?
This is the most fool tings I have seen!”
You may be sure that was the first and last of the warders.
November 2, 1864
As it was fine, after three days rain, General Humphreys bestirred himself to give rational entertainment to the two Englanders; and so General Meade ordered a couple of brigades of cavalry turned out and a horse-battery.
We first rode along the rear line and went into a fort there.
It made quite a cortege, for, besides the Generals and their officers and orderlies, there followed Mr. Lunn in a four-horse spring waggon, with General Hunt to bear him company; for Lunn had received the horseback proposition with mild horror.
So he followed in a waggon, much as Mr. Pickwick was wheeled after the shooting party, when he finally turned up in the pound.
In the fort was a company of soldiers that you might know beforehand were Germans, so dirty and especially so grimy — they have a great facility for looking grimy do the Germans.
It was funny to see the different chaps among them: one, evidently a ci-devant Prussian soldier, was seized with rigidity in all his muscles on beholding a live brace of Generals.
There was another who was an unmistakable student; he had a moustache, a poetically fierce air, a cap with the