And The Proprietor Was Right, For Had We Not Done So, The Treacle Would Have Run Off Through The Whole House. But After This We Fared Royally.

Squirrel soup and prairie chickens regaled us.

One of our new friends had laden his pockets with champagne and brandy; the other with glasses and a corkscrew; and as the bottle went round, I began to feel something of the spirit of Mark Tapley in my soul.

But our visit to Cairo had been made rather with reference to its present warlike character than with any eye to the natural beauties of the place. A large force of men had been collected there, and also a fleet of gun-boats. We had come there fortified with letters to generals and commodores, and were prepared to go through a large amount of military inspection. But the bird had flown before our arrival; or rather the body and wings of the bird, leaving behind only a draggled tail and a few of its feathers. There were only a thousand soldiers at Cairo when we were there - that is, a thousand stationed in the Cairo sheds. Two regiments passed through the place during the time, getting out of one steamer on to another, or passing from the railway into boats. One of these regiments passed before me down the slope of the river bank, and the men as a body seemed to be healthy. Very many were drunk, and all were mud- clogged up to their shoulders and very caps. In other respects they appeared to be in good order. It must be understood that these soldiers, the volunteers, had never been made subject to any discipline as to cleanliness. They wore their hair long. Their hats or caps, though all made in some military form and with some military appendance, were various and ill assorted. They all were covered with loose, thick, blue-gray great-coats, which no doubt were warm and wholesome, but which from their looseness and color seemed to be peculiarly susceptible of receiving and showing a very large amount of mud. Their boots were always good; but each man was shod as he liked. Many wore heavy overboots coming up the leg - boots of excellent manufacture, and from their cost, if for no other reason, quite out of the reach of an English soldier - boots in which a man would be not at all unfortunate to find himself hunting; but from these, or from their high-lows, shoes, or whatever they might wear, the mud had never been even scraped. These men were all warmly clothed, but clothed apparently with an endeavor to contract as much mud as might be possible.

The generals and commodores were gone up the Ohio River and up the Tennessee in an expedition with gunboats, which turned out to be successful, and of which we have all read in the daily history of this war. They had departed the day before our arrival; and though we still found at Cairo a squadron of gun-boats - if gun-boats go in squadrons - the bulk of the army had been moved.

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