But the frightful mortality of the camp does not strike the imagination so forcibly as does the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman cares to analyze hospital reports and compare the medical with the surgical history of the war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is not so easily forgotten, and the dominant note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the dominant note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as military. The Confederate soldier was often on short rations, but the civilian was not much better off. I do not mean those whose larders were swept by the besom of the invaders. "Not a dust of flour, not an ounce of meat, left in the house," was not an uncommon cry along the line of march; but it was heard elsewhere, and I remember how I raked up examples of European and Asiatic frugality with which to reinforce my editorials and hearten my readers,--the scanty fare of the French peasant, the raw oatmeal of the Scotch stonecutter, the flinty bread of the Swiss mountaineer, the Spaniard's cloves of garlic, the Greek's handful of olives, and the Hindoo's handful of rice. The situation was often gayly accepted. The not infrequent proclamation of fastdays always served as a text for mutual banter, and starvation-parties were the rule, social gatherings at which apples were the chief refreshment. Strange streaks of luxury varied this dead level of scant and plain fare. The stock of fine wines, notably madeiras, for which the South was famous, did not all go to the hospitals. Here and there provident souls had laid in boxes of tea and bags of coffee that carried them through the war, and the chief outlay was for sugar, which rose in price as the war went on, until it almost regained the poetical character it bore in Shakespeare's time. Sugar, tea, and coffee once compassed, the daintiness of old times occasionally came back, and I have been assured by those who brought gold with them that Richmond was a paradise of cheap and good living during the war, just as the United States will be for foreigners when our currency becomes as abundant as it was in the last years of the Confederacy. Gresham's law ought to be called Aristophanes' law. In all matters pertaining to the sphere of civic life, merry Aristophanes is of more value than sombre Thucydides, and if the gospel of peace which he preaches is chiefly a variation on the theme of something to eat, small blame to him. Critics have found fault with the appetite of Odysseus as set forth by Homer. No Confederate soldier will subscribe to the censure, and there are no scenes in Aristophanes that appeal more strongly to the memory of the Southerner, civilian or soldier, than those in which the pinch of war makes itself felt.