Now, if the printer sets this up properly, you will see that, even at that early day, we knew too much to adopt the sensation style of signing orders which some officers have since learned from the _New York Herald_, thus: By command of Major-General BULGER! WASHINGTON SMITH, A. A.-G. In those days there was but little of that distinction of ranks which has come to be better observed now that our volunteers have grown into an army. You see, the process of forming an army out of its constituent element follows pretty much the fashion set by that complex machine the human animal: the materials go through all the processes of swallowing, digestion, chylifaction, chymifaction, absorption, alteration, and excretion; bone, muscle, nerve, sinew, viscera, and what not, each taking its share, and discarding the useless material that has only served, like bran in horse feed, to give volume and _prehensibility_ to the mass. Our non-commissioned staff messed with the major, who was as jolly a bachelor as need be, of some forty-nine years of growth, and thirty of butchering, that being his occupation. The adjutant, being newly married to a gaunt female, who, I hope, nagged him as he us, _preferred_ to take his meals at home. Smallweed, who had somehow got made quartermaster, couldn't go old Heavysterne, he said, and so kept as long as he could to his desultory habits of living as a citizen and a bachelor. So our mess consisted of the major, who exercised a paternal care over the rest of us, superintending, indeed often joining in, our amusements and discussions, our quarrels and makings up; of Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, who knew all about everything and everybody better than anybody, and was always ready to ventilate his superior knowledge on the slightest provocation, and who, as Smallweed, now Lieutenant Smallweed, used to say, 'would have made a d----d elegant quartermaster-sergeant, if he hadn't had a moral objection to issuing anything;' of Chaplain Bender, a sanctified-looking individual of promiscuous theology and doubtful morals (the funny men used to speak of him irreverently as Hell Bender); of the battalion commissary, Lieutenant Fippany, an unmitigated swell; of Commissary-Sergeant Peck, a stumpy little fellow, full of facts and figures, and always quiet and ready; of the writer, Sergeant-Major Jenkins, or Jinkens as my name used to be mispronounced, infinitely to my disgust; and lastly, semi-occasionally, of the sutler, Mr. Cann. The surgeon, old Doctor Peacack, ran a separate mess, consisting of himself, the assistant surgeon, Dr. Launcelot Cutts, and hospital steward Spatcheloe.