And so on.  These rare flashes of fun only served to throw the underlying misery out in greater relief.  It was like lightning playing across the surface of a dreary morass.

I have before alluded several times to the general inability of Rebels to count accurately, even in low numbers.  One continually met phases of this that seemed simply incomprehensible to us, who had taken in the multiplication table almost with our mother’s milk, and knew the Rule of Three as well as a Presbyterian boy does the Shorter Catechism.  A cadet—­an undergraduate of the South Carolina Military Institute —­called our roll at Florence, and though an inborn young aristocrat, who believed himself made of finer clay than most mortals, he was not a bad fellow at all.  He thought South Carolina aristocracy the finest gentry, and the South Carolina Military Institute the greatest institution of learning in the world; but that is common with all South Carolinians.

One day he came in so full of some matter of rare importance that we became somewhat excited as to its nature.  Dismissing our hundred after roll-call, he unburdened his mind: 

“Now you fellers are all so d—–­d peart on mathematics, and such things, that you want to snap me up on every opportunity, but I guess I’ve got something this time that’ll settle you.  Its something that a fellow gave out yesterday, and Colonel Iverson, and all the officers out there have been figuring on it ever since, and none have got the right answer, and I’m powerful sure that none of you, smart as you think you are, can do it.”

“Heavens, and earth, let’s hear this wonderful problem,” said we all.

“Well,” said he, “what is the length of a pole standing in a river, one-fifth of which is in the mud, two-thirds in the water, and one-eighth above the water, while one foot and three inches of the top is broken off?”

In a minute a dozen answered, “One hundred and fifty feet.”

The cadet could only look his amazement at the possession of such an amount of learning by a crowd of mudsills, and one of our fellows said contemptuously: 

“Why, if you South Carolina Institute fellows couldn’t answer such questions as that they wouldn’t allow you in the infant class up North.”

Lieutenant Barrett, our red-headed tormentor, could not, for the life of him, count those inside in hundreds and thousands in such a manner as to be reasonably certain of correctness.  As it would have cankered his soul to feel that he was being beaten out of a half-dozen rations by the superior cunning of the Yankees, he adopted a plan which he must have learned at some period of his life when he was a hog or sheep drover.  Every Sunday morning all in the camp were driven across the Creek to the East Side, and then made to file slowly back—­one at a time—­between two guards stationed on the little bridge that spanned the Creek.  By this means, if he was able to count up to one hundred, he could get our number correctly.