And then for supper two hundred gallons of rice, and twenty gallons of sauce for it, two hundred gallons of tea, toast for a thousand, and some days I have made with my own hands ninety apple pies. This would make a pie for some six hundred poor fellows who had not tasted pie for months, it might be years, sick and could not eat much. I save all the broken loaves of bread from transportation and make bread puddings in large milk pans; about forty at once will do. The patients asked for _gingerbread_, and I got extra flour and molasses and make it by the score. I have all the grease preserved and clarified, and to-morrow, if our new milk comes, we are to commence to make doughnuts. I have a barrel of nice lard ready (they had always burned it before to get it out of the way). Last Saturday night we learned that we were to change with the Eighteenth Corps, and go up in front of Petersburg, and their first loads of sick came with the order. At dark I commenced to cook puddings and gingerbread, as I could carry them best. At two o’clock A.M. I had as many of these as I could carry in an ambulance, and packed my own things in an hour, and at three A.M. in the dark, started over the pontoon bridge across the Appomattox to our new base, about four miles. Got there a little before day, and got some breakfast ready about 8.30 for four hundred men that had crossed the night previous, nearly one hundred officers. The balance followed, and in eighteen hours from the receipt of the order we were all moved--but a poor change for us. Since dark forty wounded men have been brought in, many of which will prove mortal, one with the shoulder gone, a number of legs off, one with both arms gone, some blown up with shells and terribly burned, some in the breast. By request of the surgeons, I made a pail full of nice thick eggnog (eggs beaten separately and seasoned with brandy), and carried all among them, to sleep on, and chicken broth, and I have left them all falling asleep, and I have stolen away to my tent, which is as bare as a cuckoo’s nest--dirt floor, just like the street, a narrow bed of straw, and a three-legged stand made of old cracker boxes, and a wash dish. A hospital tent without any fly constitutes my apartment and furnishing. And here it is one o’clock, damp and cold, one little fellow from the 11th Maine dying, whose groans have echoed through the camp for hours. Another noble Swiss boy, I fear mortally wounded, who thinks he shall not live till morning, and has gained a promise from me that I will see him and be with him when he dies (I have still hopes of his recovery). Oh, what a volume it would make if I could only write you what I have seen, known, heard, and done since I first came to this department, June 18th. The most surprising of all of which is (tell Sally) that I should have _turned cook_. Who would have “thunk it”?