When the orderly is satisfied that not one of us has run away and accepted a Colonelcy from the Confederate States since last roll-call, he notifies those unfortunates who are to be on guard for the next twenty-four hours of the honor and responsibility placed upon their shoulders.  Next he tells us what are to be the drills of the day.  Then, “Right face!  Dismissed!  Break ranks!  March!”

With ardor we instantly seize tin basins, soap, and towels, and invade a lovely oak-grove at the rear and left of our camp.  Here is a delicious spring into which we have fitted a pump.  The sylvan scene becomes peopled with “National Guards Washing,”—­a scene meriting the notice of Art as much as any “Diana and her Nymphs.”  But we have no Poussin to paint us in the dewy sunlit grove.  Few of us, indeed, know how picturesque we are at all times and seasons.

After this beau ideal of a morning toilet comes the ante-prandial drill.  Lieutenant W. arrives, and gives us a little appetizing exercise in “Carry arms!” “Support arms!” “By the right flank, march!” “Double quick!”

Breakfast follows.  My company messes somewhat helter-skelter in a big tent.  We have very tolerable rations.  Sometimes luxuries appear of potted meats and hermetical vegetables, sent us by the fond New Yorkers.  Each little knot of fellows, too, cooks something savory.  Our table-furniture is not elegant, our plates are tin, there is no silver in our forks; but a la guerre, comme a la guerre.  Let the scrubs growl!  Lucky fellows, if they suffer no worse hardships than this!

By-and-by, after breakfast, come company-drills, bayonet-practice, battalion-drills, and the heavy work of the day.  Our handsome Colonel, on a nice black nag, manoeuvres his thousand men of the line-companies on the parade for two or three hours.  Two thousand legs step off accurately together.  Two thousand pipe-clayed cross-belts—­whitened with infinite pains and waste of time, and offering a most inviting mark to a foe—­restrain the beating bosoms of a thousand braves, as they—­the braves, not the belts—­go through the most intricate evolutions unerringly.  Watching these battalion movements, Private W., perhaps, goes off and inscribes in his journal,—­“Any clever, prompt man, with a mechanical turn, an eye for distance, a notion of time, and a voice of command, can be a tactician.  It is pure pedantry to claim that the manoeuvring of troops is difficult:  it is not difficult, if the troops are quick and steady.  But to be a general, with patience and purpose and initiative,—­ah!” thinks Private W., “for that you must have the man of genius; and already in this war he begins to appear out of Massachusetts and elsewhere.”

Private W. avows without fear that about noon, at Camp Cameron, he takes a hearty dinner, and with satisfaction.  Private W. has had his feasts in cot and chateau in Old World and New.  It is the conviction of said private that nowhere and no-when has he expected his ration with more interest, and remembered it with more affection, than here.