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I have my commission and we go into barracks when they are read . . . . I drill my company every afternoon two hours out doors and enjoy it much.
And later in the same month he added:—
I feel just like a father of a family when I go up to the quarters at meal times and see my sage first sergeant taking tea . . . sitting . . . behind a pine board, eating baked apples, illumined by a stearine dip stuck in a potato.
Or later when four beautiful voices sing quartettes.
My sergeants hold evening prayers, to which many of the company go, sometimes half; and at nine there is a roll-call, after which all go to bed and nine hundred men snore in concert in one vast hall, with scarce a partition between.
At five A. M. comes a rolling of drums, like churning and boiling in one, which is the reveille . . . to which all the men bundle up and one commissioned officer at least to each Company—then drill from 6 to 7 and then breakfast and four hours more, drilling through the day.
A month later the new captain reported:—
We are sailing smoothly now at the camp. . . . They cannot be said to love me, and I heard yesterday of an inebriated Irish private singing along Main St., “Old Higgie is so strict, so strict,” etc., while another in a similar condition came to the
