unhealthy, for the following spring only fifteen of them left it alive, and they were walking skeletons, half clothed in miserable rags. On the 22d our brigade took position on Moccasin Point, on the north bank of the Tennessee River, immediately opposite the frowning brow of Lookout Mountain, where we guarded the river front and were at liberty to contemplate the rare beauty of this magnificent specimen of mountain scenery. Two miles in height of mountain slope! clad in the many colored robe of autumn; its base laved by the pellucid Tennessee. The songs of innumerable birds mingling with the rippling of the waters in a gentle roundelay--punctuated at intervals by the staccato notes of the festive rebel gun--followed by the not-too-gentle dropping of an ounce of lead uncomfortably near the venturous Yank who protruded his head beyond the bushes in order to enjoy the sylvan scene: reminding him that there is no rose without its thorn. This was starvation camp. For a full month we were on less than quarter rations, and the normal condition of the stomach was ravenous. We soon cleaned the cornfield down to the last sprouted nubbin on the ground. After I had been hungry for about two weeks, I struck a teamster, who had some corn for his mules; and begged him for an ear. He declined as the mules were over-worked, hauling our rations over sixty miles of mountain road. They were daily dying by scores, and there must be no lack of rations for those that were still able to pull. It was easier for a hungry soldier to pull a trigger, than for hungry mules to pull a wagon load. My judgment accepted his reasoning, but my appetite was not so easily convinced--so I bribed him with ten cents to look the other way while I stole an ear. I ate it raw. It was good enough that way, and I wasn’t proud. I hope the mules enjoyed what was left, as well as I enjoyed that ear. I have seen the boys dig the grains of corn from the stiff mud where the mules had fed, and rubbing the mud off, eat them without parching. They had the best of seasoning, a good appetite. We often thought with the poet: “The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year.” On the 27th of October we were ordered down to Brown’s Ferry to co-operate with a force who, before daylight that morning, had glided down the river in a fleet of boats--rounding Moccasin Point, and slipping past the rebel pickets without disturbing their rest, effected a landing at the Ferry, and constructed a pontoon bridge on which we crossed. Here we waited, to hail the approach of, and smooth the way for, General Hooker, who was moving up from Bridgeport, Alabama, with the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps, driving the rebels out of the valley south of the river, thus shortening our cracker line to twenty-two miles.