of crackers, coffee, dried-apples, essence of beef, and salt pork in abundance, a little loaf bread, and about half a pound of citric acid.  Of these only the crackers and bread could be eaten without being cooked.  There were four hundred and fifty wounded men—­all bad cases, all exhausted from privation.  How many of them would live to reach Washington on a diet of crackers and water?  I went to the cook, a large, sensible colored woman, and stated the case as well as I could.  After hearing it she said: 

“I see how it is; but you see all these officers and ladies are agoin to board with the captain, an’ I’ll have a sight o’ cooking to do.  I can’t have none of those fine ladies comin’ a botherin’ around me, carryin’ off my things or upsettin’ ’em.  But I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll hurry up my work and clare off my things; then you can have the kitchen, you an’ that young lady that’s with you; but them women, with their hoops an’ their flounces, must stay out o’ here!”

It was hard to see how two of them would get into that small domain, a kitchen about ten feet square, half filled by a cook-stove, shelves, and the steep, narrow, open stairs which led to the upper deck; but what a kingdom that little kitchen was to me!  All the utensils leaked, but cook helped me draw rags through the holes in the three largest which I was to have, and which covered the top of the stove.  There were plenty of new wooden buckets and tin dippers on board as freight, some contraband women, and an active little man, who had once been a cook’s assistant.  He and the women were glad to work for food.  He was to help me in the kitchen.  They worked outside, and must not get in the way of the crew.  They washed dried apples and put them to soak in buckets, pounded crackers in bags and put the crumbs into buckets, making each one a third full and covering them with cold water.  I put a large piece of salt pork into my largest boiler, added water and beef essence enough to almost fill the boiler, seasoned it, and as soon as it reached boiling point had it ladled into the buckets with the cracker-crumbs, and sent for distribution.  The second boiler was kept busy cooking dried apples, into which I put citric acid and sugar, for gangrene prevailed among the wounds.  In the third boiler I made coffee; I kept it a-soak, and as soon as it boiled I put it strong into buckets, one-third full of cold water.  I kept vessels in the oven and on the small spaces on top of the stove.  My little man fired up like a fire-king, another man laid plenty of wood at hand; and I think that was the only cook-stove that was ever “run” to its full capacity for a week.  By so running it, I could give every man a pint of warm soup and one of warm coffee every twenty-four hours.  To do this, everything must “come to time.”