We went back, rosy, panting, glowing, but happy, to get our selves some breakfast.

Should Providence, for some inscrutable reason, vouchsafe me the years of Methuselah, one of the pleasantest recollections that will abide with me to the close of the nine hundredth and sixty-ninth year, will be of that delightful odor of cooking food which regaled our senses as we came back.  From the boiling coffee and the meat frying in the pan rose an incense sweeter to the senses a thousand times than all the perfumes of far Arabia.  It differed from the loathsome odor of cooking corn meal as much as it did from the effluvia of a sewer.

Our noses were the first of our senses to bear testimony that we had passed from the land of starvation to that of plenty.  Andrews and I hastened off to get our own breakfast, and soon had a half-gallon of strong coffee, and a frying-pan full, of meat cooking over the fire—­not one of the beggarly skimped little fires we had crouched over during our months of imprisonment, but a royal, generous fire, fed with logs instead of shavings and splinters, and giving out heat enough to warm a regiment.

Having eaten positively all that we could swallow, those of us who could walk were ordered to fall in and march over to Wilmington.  We crossed the branch of the river on a pontoon bridge, and took the road that led across the narrow sandy island between the two branches, Wilmington being situated on the opposite bank of the farther one.

When about half way a shout from some one in advance caused us to look up, and then we saw, flying from a tall steeple in Wilmington, the glorious old Stars and Stripes, resplendent in the morning sun, and more beautiful than the most gorgeous web from Tyrian looms.  We stopped with one accord, and shouted and cheered and cried until every throat was sore and every eye red and blood-shot.  It seemed as if our cup of happiness would certainly run over if any more additions were made to it.

When we arrived at the bank of the river opposite Wilmington, a whole world of new and interesting sights opened up before us.  Wilmington, during the last year-and-a-half of the war, was, next to Richmond, the most important place in the Southern Confederacy.  It was the only port to which blockade running was at all safe enough to be lucrative.  The Rebels held the strong forts of Caswell and Fisher, at the mouth of Cape Fear River, and outside, the Frying Pan Shoals, which extended along the coast forty or fifty miles, kept our blockading fleet so far off, and made the line so weak and scattered, that there was comparatively little risk to the small, swift-sailing vessels employed by the blockade runners in running through it.  The only way that blockade running could be stopped was by the reduction of Forts Caswell and Fisher, and it was not stopped until this was done.