It is almost midnight, and I ought to go to bed this minute, and I want to speak to you first, and I am going to indulge my inclination just a little minute till this page is down, if no more; but it will be all egotism, so be prepared, and don’t blame me. I know you are doing well and living just as quietly and happily as you deserve to do. I hear from no one, and indeed I scarce write at all; and no one would wonder if they could look in upon my family and know besides that we had _moved_ this week--yes, _moved_ a family of fifteen hundred sick men, and had to keep our housekeeping up all the time; and no one to be ready at hand and ask us to take tea the first night either. I have never told you how I returned--well, safely, and got off from City Point and my goods off its dock _just in time_ to avoid that terrible catastrophe. I was not blown to atoms, but might have been and no one the wiser. I found my “sick family” somewhat magnified on my return, and soon the Corps (10th) was ordered to cross the James, and make a feint while the Weldon Railroad was captured, and this move threw all the sick in Regimental Hospital into our hospital, five hundred in one night. Only think of such an addition to a family between supper and breakfast and no preparation; and just that morning our old cook John and his assistant Peter both came down sick, one with inflammation of the lungs and the other with fever. It was all the surgeons, stewards, and clerks could do to keep the names straight and manage the official portion of the reception; and, would you believe it, I stepped into the gap and assumed the responsibility of the kitchen and feeding of our twelve hundred, and I held it and kept it straight till I selected a new boss cook and got him regularly installed and then helped him all the time up to the present day. I wish I had some of my bills of fare preserved as they read for the day. The variety is by no means so striking as the quantity. Say for breakfast seven hundred loaves of bread, one hundred and seventy gallons of hot coffee, two large wash-boilers full of tea, one barrel of apple sauce, one barrel of sliced boiled pork, or thirty hams, one half barrel of corn-starch blancmange, five hundred slices of butter toast, one hundred slices of broiled steak, and one hundred and fifty patients, to be served with chicken gruel, boiled eggs, etc. For dinner we have over two hundred gallons of soup, or boiled dinner of three barrels of potatoes, two barrels of turnips, two barrels of onions, two barrels of squash, one hundred gallons of minute pudding, one wash-boiler full of whiskey sauce for it, or a large washtub full of codfish nicely picked, and stirred in a batter to make one hundred and fifty gallons of nice home codfish, and the Yankee soldiers cry when they taste it (I prepared it just the old home way, and so I have everything cooked), and the same toasts and corn starch as for breakfast.