"It Was Pretty Well Time,"
He Said, "To Crush Out This Rebellion, And By - - It Must And
Should Be Crushed Out; General Jim Lane Was The Man To Do It, And By
- - General Jim Lane Would Do It!" And So On.
In all such
conversations the time for action has always just come, and also the
expected man.
But the time passes by as other weeks and months have
passed before it, and the new general is found to be no more
successful than his brethren. Our friend was very angry against
England. "When we've polished off these accursed rebels, I guess
we'll take a turn at you. You had your turn when you made us give
up Mason and Slidell, and we'll have our turn by-and-by." But in
spite of his dislike to our nation he invited us warmly to come and
see him at his home on the Missouri River. It was, according to his
showing, a new Eden, a Paradise upon earth. He seemed to think that
we might perhaps desire to buy a location, and explained to us how
readily we could make our fortunes. But he admitted in the course
of his eulogiums that it would be as much as his life was worth to
him to ride out five miles from his own house. In the mean time the
teamsters greased their boots, the soldiers snored, those who were
wet took off their shoes and stockings, hanging them to dry round
the stove, and the Western farmers chewed tobacco in silence, and
ruminated. At such a house all the guests go in to their meals
together. A gong is sounded on a sudden, close behind your ears;
accustomed as you may probably be to the sound, you jump up from
your chair in the agony of the crash, and by the time that you have
collected your thoughts the whole crowd is off in a general stampede
into the eating-room. You may as well join them; if you hesitate as
to feeding with so rough a lot of men, you will have to set down
afterward with the women and children of the family, and your lot
will then be worse. Among such classes in the Western States the
men are always better than the women. The men are dirty and civil,
the women are dirty and uncivil.
On the following day we visited the camp, going out in an ambulance
and returning on horseback. We were accompanied by the general's
aid-de-camp, and also, to our great gratification, by the general's
daughter. There had been a hard frost for some nights, but though
the cold was very great there was always heat enough in the middle
of the day to turn the surface of the ground into glutinous mud;
consequently we had all the roughness induced by frost, but none of
the usually attendant cleanliness. Indeed, it seemed that in these
parts nothing was so dirty as frost. The mud stuck like paste and
encompassed everything.
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