The milk punch, the onions, the bread, and meat and coffee tired of fighting it out in the narrow quarters where I had stowed them, had started upwards tumultuously.

I turned my head again to the sea, and looking down into its smaragdine depths, let go of the victualistic store which I had been industriously accumulating ever since I had come through the lines.

I vomited until I felt as empty and hollow as a stove pipe.  There was a vacuum that extended clear to my toe-nails.  I feared that every retching struggle would dent me in, all over, as one sees tin preserving cans crushed in by outside pressure, and I apprehended that if I kept on much longer my shoe-soles would come up after the rest.

I will mention, parenthetically, that, to this day I abhor milk punch, and also onions.

Unutterably miserable as I was I could not refrain from a ghost of a smile, when a poor country boy near me sang out in an interval between vomiting spells: 

“O, Captain, for God’s sake, stop the boat and lem’me go ashore, and I swear I’ll walk every step of the way home.”

He was like old Gonzalo in the ‘Tempest:’ 

     Now world I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren
     ground; long heath; brown furze; anything.  The wills above be done!
     but I would fain die a dry death.

After this misery had lasted about two days we got past Cape Hatteras, and out of reach of its malign influence, and recovered as rapidly as we had been prostrated.

We regained spirits and appetites with amazing swiftness; the sun came out warm and cheerful, we cleaned up our quarters and ourselves as best we could, and during the remainder of the voyage were as blithe and cheerful as so many crickets.

The fun in the cabin was rollicking.  The officers had been as sick as the men, but were wonderfully vivacious when the ‘mal du mer’ passed off.  In the party was a fine glee club, which had been organized at “Camp Sorgum,” the officers’ prison at Columbia.  Its leader was a Major of the Fifth Iowa Cavalry, who possessed a marvelously sweet tenor voice, and well developed musical powers.  While we were at Wilmington he sang “When Sherman Marched Down to the Sea,” to an audience of soldiers that packed the Opera House densely.

The enthusiasm he aroused was simply indescribable; men shouted, and the tears ran down their faces.  He was recalled time and again, each time with an increase in the furore.  The audience would have staid there all night to listen to him sing that one song.  Poor fellow, he only went home to die.  An attack of pneumonia carried him off within a fortnight after we separated at Annapolis.

The Glee Club had several songs which they rendered in regular negro minstrel style, and in a way that was irresistibly ludicrous.  One of their favorites was “Billy Patterson.”  All standing up in a ring, the tenors would lead off: