Colonel Theodore Lyman, With Grant and Meade from the Wilderness to Appomattox
George R. Agassiz, Ed.

[287] give him his boots. Captain Freikle told me he had a mind to make the scoundrel march the twenty miles barefooted, but couldn't bring his mind to anything so mean. I would have made him do it.

At the end of each month, General Meade sends up his pay-rolls, that is, a large printed sheet which each officer fills up, stating what the Government owes him, and saying that he hasn't cheated Uncle Sam, and don't owe him anything and is all right generally. The pay department keeps this as a receipt and returns your money for the past month. Lieutenant-Colonel Woodruff gets the General's pay. One part he sends to Mrs. Meade and the rest he sends to the General, who, the moment that he gets it, sends violently for Mercier and John and everyone else to whom he is indebted, and pays them all, in hot haste, as if his last day were come. He is a thorough old soldier about money and regards greenbacks in a weak and helpless sort of way. “Once,” said he, “Mrs. Meade said it was my plain duty to go to market, as other gentlemen did: it would be so satisfactory and saving. I went the next morning. We had a famous dinner — oysters, terrapin, and lots of good things — the children were delighted; but, when I came to look, I found I had spent the week's allowance in one day! I wasn't allowed to go any more to market.” You would have laughed to see yesterday the crowd of contrabands that came in with Gregg. Usually, wherever they can, they cut and run, not showing that devotion to their masters described by the Southrons. It is sometimes rather remarkable the way they run off. Now in this lot (mostly women) there was all the way from a newly born baby to an old woman who, they told me, was over ninety,