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once make them laugh, and the cloud is dispelled. —Meanwhile on board the transports with white troops, there is generally grumbling and dissatisfaction.—Every captain of a transport who has once taken my regiment wishes to take it again in preference to whites . . . .
The very listening to these people is like adjusting the ear to some foreign tongue.
Imagine one of the camp washerwomen saying dramatically to-day, “I took she when she am dat high, and now if him wants to leave we, let he go” ; the person thus chaotically portrayed being a little adopted girl who had deserted her.
In January, the
Colonel reports that he has presented a sheep to a fellow-officer's wife, and says:—
You don't know how pastoral I feel, when I contemplate my little flock of sheep straying round to find something to nibble; as soon as they succeed they will grow fat and we shall nibble them.
They are pro-slavery sheep, as Kansas used to say.
It was necessary to exercise some ingenuity in order to keep up military guise, for
Colonel Higginson wrote to his wife:—
When any occasion requires the Doctor to be magnificent, I am to whip off my shoulderstraps and put on his. So we shall both have a dress coat.
No longer will the sentinels in Beaufort shoulder arms remotely to my buttons (salute for a captain) and then hastily present arms when my colonel's straps
