000

HISTORY'OF THE ORPHAN RRIGADE.

claim kinship with our native State, and peopled by families that would honor any section. No troops had ever been stationed there; and the First Kentucky had from six to eight weeks of relaxation and enjoyment. Military duty was light and easy to these veterans of so many campaigns; the paymaster came and the command received all arrearages ; money was plentiful, and the citizens in the neighborhood got it all in return for the delicacies they brought daily into camp. Fruits were abundant. The supply of watermelons, sweet and luscious, was so great that the cost was merely nominal. Sweet potatoes, then in market, with green corn and the juciest of young and tender beef, were staple articles of diet.

'' For two years these men had known nothing like this. Often subsisting for many successive days on what they could hastily forage in poor regions of country ; in general but inadequately supplied when their commissariat was at its best,   the contrast was striking, and to troops covetous of inglorious ease rather than honorable service, it would have been demoralizing.

" The men grew fat and saucy; but they did not forget that they must up and away at a call from the front; and they looked to their horses and accoutrements. Their animals literally lived in clover, and the worn and wasted creatures rapidly recovered flesh and spirit. The First Kentucky became once more an ideal regiment, fit for any service, ready for any emergency." The army missionaries went there, and a spacious church building near by was tendered them. Here for some weeks services were held regularly each day. The rough riders whom they hoped to reach had not established a record for either religion or pronounced morality; they resembled far more the cavaliers who rode with Rupert than the Roundheads who sang psalms and killed their brother Englishmen in the name of the Lord; but they were gentlemen born and bred, and they respected these ministers of God and attended the services as regularly as they had been wont to do in peaceful and sunnier days in their old Kentucky home. They listened to the earnest pleas of the good missionaries, and some of them publicly proclaimed their intention to lead henceforth a Christian life, and they kept the pledge, too.

"During its campaigns succeeding Stone River the regiment had been very indifferently armed. Their gun was the Columbus carbine, a weapon made at Columbus, Ga., short of range, loosely constructed, unreliable in almost every respect, and a cause of uneasiness in battle, and of much complaint. On the march to Spring Creek, these carbines were left at the arsenal in Rome to be repaired. When ordered to the front, last week in August, the command found them rusty and still out of order; they had been untouched by the gunsmith and his