and shovels, cutting into Virginia, digging into Virginia, shovelling up Virginia, for Virginia’s protection against pseudo-Virginians.
I swarmed in for a little while with our Paymaster, picked a little, spaded a little, shovelled a little, took a hand to my great satisfaction at earth-works, and for my efforts I venture to suggest that Jersey City owes me its freedom in a box, and Jersey State a basket of its finest Clicquot.
Is my gentle reader tired of the short marches and frequent halts of the Seventh? Remember, gentle reader, that you must be schooled by such alphabetical exercises to spell bigger words — skirmish, battle, defeat, rout, massacre — by and by.
Well, — to be Xenophontic, —from the Race-Course that evening we marched one stadium, one parasang, to a cedar-grove up the road. In the grove is a spring worthy to be called a fountain, and what I determined by infallible indications to be a lager-bier saloon. Saloon no more! War is no respector of localities. Be it Arlington House, the seedy palace of a Virginia Don, — be it the humbler, but seedy, pavilion where the tired Teuton washes the dust of Washington away from his tonsils, — each must surrender to the bold soldier-boy. Exit Champagne and its goblet; exit lager and its mug; enter whiskey-and-water in a tin pot. Such are the horrors of civil war!
And now I must cut short my story, for graver matters press. As to the residence of the Seventh
