L. P. Brockett, The camp, the battlefield, and the hospital: or, lights and shadows of the great rebellion

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[375] chief. Such scenes as were there enacted, and such a terrible realization of Pandemonium, no artist's facile pencil, or this feeble pen, can half portray. Up-stairs, down-stairs, inside, outside, kitchen, dining-room, parlor, and bedroom, all shared the general tumult, and not a cob-webbed nook escaped overhauling from these inquisitive “mudsills.”

In the parlor was a fine piano, drummed and played upon alternately, with a boisterous crowd of soldiers leaning upon it, each one shouting for some particular tune expressive of their musical tastes. “Give us glory Hallelujah,” shouts one. “No, that's played out,” says another. “Play rally round the flag.” “Pshaw! Give us a jig,” and thus it went, a perfect jargon of sound filling the apartment, while in one corner of the room two soldiers were at work winding up and causing an old clock to strike. Look into the entry with me, and see the scrambling of fifty soldiers over a barrel of flour and a barrel of sugar and molasses, while feather beds are torn to pieces. One mischievous fellow has found the dinner bell, and yells out “Fifteen minutes for dinner.” Another has discovered a string of cow bells, and at once strives to drown the inharmonious sounds of his rivals.

With the drumming of the piano, the striking clock, the blowing of horns, the rattling of dishes, the ringing of cow and dinner bells, the clatter of a sewing machine, and the wrangling of soldiers over the spoils, the ear was appalled and deafened, furniture, bedding, cooking utensils, books, pictures, china-ware, ladies' wearing apparel, hoop skirts and bonnets, were thrown together in promiscuous heaps with all sorts of dirty rubbish.