A. J. Bennett, private , First Massachusetts Light Battery, The story of the First Massachusetts Light Battery , attached to the Sixth Army Corps : glance at events in the armies of the Potomac and Shenandoah, from the summer of 1861 to the autumn of 1864.

[68] unpalatable. But though we did not ‘see the folks and get some peaches,’ some of us who went down upon the beach during the evening, saw the waves of the York glistening with phosphorescent beams; a singular, and to the most of us then, an unaccountable, spectacle. So then it was away to blanket, to sleep, to dream of waves ignited and ablaze, and extinguished by the early bugle-call. Then in quick succession, stable, feed, and water calls, and southward, ho! along the swamps, now doubly historic, but perpetually miasmatic. Near mid-day we pass down to ill-fated Bethel; then up and on, now south, now east, to the shore of Hampton road.

A night upon the shore near Fortress Monroe, embarkation on the morrow, lying all that day in Hampton road, an inexplicable tarry of our transport fleet for another twenty-four hours, and 't is the eve of the 28th of August, 1862. Then, when the mind of the average private is as blank of conjecture as the white clapboards of Hygeia Hotel yonder, we sail up the Chesapeake. Our method of transportation is much the same as that employed last April to bring us to Ship Point. We were two days in reaching Alexandria, the weather during the voyage being fine.

The skill of the cooks on the schooner which carried the drivers and their horses and Lieut. Federhen, was exercised more than once in concocting a delectable mess called ‘scouse,’ which, on these occasions at least, was prepared by placing in the kettle layers of salt beef, potatoes and onions, and hard-tack, in the foregoing serial order. A cupful of this, smoking from the kettle, was indeed appetizing, for the air of the bay induces a keen relish for wholesome food. One of our cooks had made no little complaint of the meanness of the skipper's wife, who, he said, begrudged him a few minutes', use of the galley stove. And he further said that she was continually nagging the stable-guard because he was not sufficiently alert in keeping the heads of the horses which stood next the galley, out of its door; the guard, in walking his beat, being sometimes two-thirds the length of the schooner from the door. This account of the woman having been heard by one of the boys who was to go upon the third relief, the lad looked somewhat askance at the lady as she appeared at the door, when he turned at the farther end of his beat, and perceived her watching