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They liked to have a garrison there, for they always lived better and the soldiers almost always behaved well.
They were months without bread—living on potatoes, squashes and milk and sometimes even wild onions and garlic and boiled clover.’
‘It was so strange,’ he wrote from
Florida,
to touch at Jacksonville as a quiet passenger, where I could once have burned the city with a word.
However, greatness is always appreciated and a man came on board with a message for the steamboat Captain and insisted on delivering it to me. I have n't had such an honor since my little nephew took me (in uniform) for a policeman . . . . Colored church in evening with just such “shouting” as we used to have in my regiment—I feared it was all gone.
Things are so little changed to the eye, it is almost incredible that fifteen years have passed.
‘I have been down to
Jacksonville for the day,’ he wrote from
Magnolia.
I said in my “Army Life” that I should feel like a Rip Van Winkle who once wore uniform—but it went beyond my dreams in that way. The city I had last seen deserted and in flames, I found made over into a summer paradise. . . . I was alone with my ghosts of fifteen years ago and got a horse and went wandering round, searching for my past.
The forts we built were levelled, only a furrow here and there in the ground.
Where we made a lookout in a steeple, there was the church, but with a new spire.
The house where I sat all night on the doorsteps waiting for an attack was burned long since.
The house I had for headquarters, then the
