[223] eyed that noble quadruped, the horse, with half the murderous feeling which fills my heart, after I have been for an hour or so on the back of a quartermaster's horse. The animal furnished me today is a small, stumpy, coarse-haired, thick-eared, yellowish-gray beast, with the stupidity of a penguin and the hide of an alligator. I tried in vain before I left to buy a pair of spurs, but could find none that would go over my leather leggings. Tired with continuous and unavailing castigation, I resorted to the use of a stout pin. The pin doubled up, but did n't even rouse him. He was left to his own devices and the prospect of supper; one or the other finally brought him here. . . . . With me and the horse came a rubber bag containing much Sanitary knowledge, and the means of asking thirty-six hundred questions, that being the extent to which (as you will ascertain by a very simple process of arithmetic, if you assume the command to contain twenty thousand men, and the number of questions to each regiment to be one hundred and eighty) my inquisitive powers are to be exerted.
Fortress Monroe, January 26, 1862.... Do you know that I am so far removed from anything approaching civilized society, and am so much in the daily habit of talking about dirt and bad air to all whom I meet, that when it comes to sitting down and talking to a person who is n't dirty and does n't breathe bad air, I hardly know what to say? . . . . I was sorry not to get over to Hampton to see the ruins of what every one speaks of as a most picturesque old town; but the day on which I intended to go was much occupied in waiting to find Captain L., who had just come from Hatteras, that I might learn whether or not I could go back with him, and I did not feel justified in taking the day for a mere excursion. That, by the way, is a great evil in selling yourself for a fixed salary; you feel perpetually as if all the time not given directly to the business in hand was so much money obtained on false pretences, and that you were nothing if not Sanitary at all times and places.
Chesapeake Hospital, Fortress Monroe, April 1.. . . . When I wrote the other day that I was rapidly forgetting how to practise medicine, I did not think that I should so soon be immersed in an extensive practice, and that too under the most disagreeable circumstances. Though this hospital was not half ready, and no proper means were provided for attending a single very sick man, nearly one hundred patients have been sent in here, and we
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Sever and Francis, 1866.
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