But the same genius which invented the hardtack must also have invented that other main element of the ration, rusty salt pork, an infernal compound of animal fat, with sodium chloride, in which the chloride predominated, a combination of the cheapest of minerals with the basest of animals, and rusted by time and heat of the climate. I speak of coffee respectfully. It was not “Java and Mocha Mixed.” Do you remember how the men carried it on the march? The detachable lining of the haversack furnished the bag. The ground coffee and the brown sugar, well mixed, made a solid ball held in the bottom under a retaining knot tied in the bag itself. A well-battered tin can served as the pot, and in it the mixture was boiled until the last percentage of caffeine was extracted, and the liquid and solid parts were in equal and uniform mixture. Then came that miracle of simultaneous cooling and settling and diluting by a little cool water poured on the top. What a fountain of life we drank from that flowing bowl, soothing to tired muscles and sore feet. It is true that our diet had not always the same monotony. At Wapping Heights, in what the men called the “Molasses Gap,” in July of 1863, we had marched away from these regular rations, and our diet was more varied and scanty. The purveyor for my mess who had charge of my led horse and the incidental purveying captured a lean old duck. A few fragments of beet leaves from a trampled garden, and a half handful of cracker dust from his inverted haversack, water, the fragments of duck, and no salt, the whole imperfectly boiled, was offered for our dinner. It was several years before my stomach would accept duck again. Later in the day we had a handful of blueberries. The next day, returning out of the gap, the brigade nearly went to pieces in an old blackberry field. Later in the day a lean, wayworn steer was sacrificed, speedily dissected, and passed around while still warm to be broiled in the smoke. As Dr. Johnson said of the beef in the Hebrides, it was “ill-kept, ill-killed, ill-dressed, ill-cooked, and ill-served.” Too tough for chewing, it could be cut small and swallowed. In the night, on picket, there was a shower, by advantage of which some of my men stole a hive of honey. I ate, in the rage of hunger, I think a couple of pounds, comb, grubs and all, and then an oppressive doubt struck me that perhaps beeswax was not digestible. But I slept well, though wet, after a day in which the fare, scanty but diversified, was blueberries, blackberries, tough beef, and honey, served in succession. But I am rambling. The war ended at Appomattox, in a climax, both in a military and dietetic sense. The climax of the diet consisted in the fact that, having run away from our wagons and the pork and hardtack, for two days we had nothing, which fact prepared me for an anticlimax.