Sundry dignitaries, Presidents and what not, have lived here in times gone by.  Whoever chose the site ought to be kindly remembered for his good taste.  The house stands upon the pretty terrace commanding the plain of Washington.  From the upper windows we can see the Potomac opening southward like a lake, and between us and the water ambitious Washington stretching itself along and along, like the shackly files of an army of recruits.

Oaks love the soil of this terrace.  There are some noble ones on the undulations before the house.  It may be permitted even for one who is supposed to think of nothing but powder and ball to notice one of these grand trees.  Let the ivy-covered stem of the Big Oak of Camp Cameron take its place in literature!  And now enough of scenery.  The landscape will stay, but the troops will not.  There are trees and slopes of green-sward elsewhere, and shrubbery begins to blossom in these bright days of May before a thousand pretty homes.  The tents and the tent-life are more interesting for the moment than objects which cannot decamp.

The old villa serves us for head-quarters.  It is a respectable place, not without its pretensions.  Four granite pillars, as true grit as if the two Presidents Adams had lugged them on their shoulders all the way from Quincy, Mass., make a carriage-porch.  Here is the Colonel in the big west parlor, the Quartermaster and Commissary in the rooms with sliding-doors on the east, the Hospital upstairs, and so on.  Other rooms, numerous as the cells in a monastery, serve as quarters for the Engineer Company.  These dens are not monastic in aspect.  The house is, of course, a Certosa, so far as the gentler sex are concerned; but no anchorites dwell here at present.  If the Seventh disdained everything but soldiers’ fare,—­which it does not,—­common civility would require that it should do violence to its disinclination for comfort and luxury, and consume the stores sent down by ardent patriots in New York.  The cellars of the villa overflow with edibles, and in the greenhouse is a most appetizing array of barrels, boxes, cans, and bottles, shipped here that our Sybarites might not sigh for the flesh-pots of home.  Such trash may do very well to amuse the palate in these times of half-peace, half-hostility; but when

  “war, which for a space does fail,
  Shall doubly thundering swell the gale,”

then every soldier should drop gracefully to the simple ration, and cease to dabble with frying-pans.  Cooks to their aprons, and soldiers to their guns!

Our tents are pitched on a level clover-field sloping to the front for our parade-ground.  We use the old wall tent without a fly.  It is necessary to live in one of these awhile to know the vast superiority of the Sibley pattern.  Sibley’s tent is a wrinkle taken from savage life.  It is the Sioux buffalo-skin, lodge, or Tepee, improved,—­a cone truncated at the top and fitted with a movable apex for ventilation.  A single tent-pole, supported upon a hinged tripod of iron, sustains the structure.  It is compacter, more commodious, healthier, and handsomer than the ancient models.  None other should be used in permanent encampments.  For marching troops, the French Tente d’abri is a capital shelter.