We were now miserable mercenaries, serving for low pay and rough rations.  Read the Southern papers and you will see us described.  “Mudsills,”—­that, I believe, is the technical word.  By repeating a form of words after a gentleman in a glazed cap and black raiment, we had suffered change into base assassins, the offscouring of society, starving for want of employment, and willing to “imbrue our coarse fists in fraternal blood” for the sum of eleven dollars a month, besides hard tack, salt junk, and the hope of a Confederate States bond apiece for bounty, or free loot in the treasuries of Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas, after the war.  How carefully from that day we watched the rise and fall of United States stocks!  If they should go low among the nineties, we felt that our eleven dollars per mensem would be imperilled.

We stayed in our palace for a week or so after April 26th, the day of the oath.  That was the most original part of our duty thus far.  New York never had so unanimous a deputation on the floor of the Representatives Chamber before, and never a more patriotic one.  Take care, Gentlemen Members of Congress! look to your words and your Acts honestly and wisely in future! don’t palter with Liberty again! it is not well that soldiers should get into the habit of thinking they are always to unravel the snarls and cut the knots twisted and tied by clumsy or crafty fingers.  The traitor States already need the main de fer,—­yes, and without the gant de velours.  Let us beware, and keep ourselves worthy of the boon of self-government, man by man!  I do not wish to hear, “Order arms!” and “Charge bayonets!” in the Capitol.  But this present defence of Free Speech and Free Thought ends, let us hope, that danger forever.

When we had been ten days in our showy barracks we began to quarrel with luxury.  What had private soldiers to do with the desks of law-givers?  Why should we be allowed to revel longer in the dining-rooms of Washington hotels, partaking the admirable dainties there?

The May sunshine, the birds and the breezes of May, invited us to Camp,—­the genuine thing, under canvas.  Besides, Uncles Sam and Abe wanted our room for other company.  Washington was filling up fast with uniforms.  It seemed as if all the able-bodied men in the country were moving, on the first of May, with all their property on their backs, to agreeable, but dusty lodgings on the Potomac.

We also made our May move.  One afternoon, my company, the Ninth, and the Engineers, the Tenth, were detailed to follow Captain Viele, and lay out a camp on Meridian Hill.

CAMP CAMERON.

As we had the first choice, we got, on the whole, the best site for a camp.  We occupy the villa and farm of Dr. Stone, two miles due north of Willard’s Hotel.  I assume that hotel as a peculiarly American point of departure, and also because it is the hub of Washington,—­the centre of an eccentric, having the White House at the end of its shorter, and the Capitol at the end of its longer radius,—­moral, so they say, as well as geometrical.