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Updated: April 30, 2025
We had to hasten our toilet, as they were striking tents and breaking camp early, in order to reach before noon the next place where there was water. Sitting on camp-stools, around the mess-tables, in the open, before the break of day, we swallowed some black coffee and ate some rather thick slices of bacon and dry bread.
At length he made a run, and resolved to burst open the door, when he heard old Grim sing out, and he found that he had, somehow or other, tumbled over him. His nostrils were at the same time assailed with savoury odours, and he saw men coming from the galley-fire with pans and dishes from which wreaths of steam were ascending. The mess-tables were quickly spread, and the men began their dinners.
This day, as I have said, we went to school after inspection and prayers by the chaplain on the upper deck, which, I should have mentioned, was the usual routine every morning when breakfast was finished and the mess-tables and decks below swept clean and made tidy.
"Smith," he said, "I would rather you had not seen this; and if it had been any other man in my company, I should perhaps have offered him money, to insure that there was no idle chattering at the mess-tables; but you I ask, as a man I can trust, to give me your word of honour as a soldier to let what you have seen and heard be sacred."
There was an old rail-fence about the place, and a large pile of boards in front. I immediately engaged four carpenters, and set them at work to make out of these boards mess-tables, benches, black-boards, etc.
Still the countenance I had seen haunted me continually, and I could not help fancying that he was still destined again to work me some evil. "Land! land ahead!" was sung out one morning, just as breakfast was over. The mess-tables were cleared in a moment, and every one not on duty below was on deck in a moment looking out for the shores we all so longed to see.
There was the chase still ahead and though we had gained considerably on her, still there were many probabilities of her escaping. The fear was that we might not get up to her before nightfall, and that then in the darkness she might escape. The men were piped to dinner, and of course the conversation at the mess-tables ran on the probabilities of our capturing the chase.
The bands played the time-honored air of The Girl I Left Behind Me, and the men cheered lustily as the ships cleared the bar, while at the mess-tables, says Knox, there was only one toast among the officers "British colors on every French fort, post, and garrison in America." With Saunders went twenty-two ships of the line five frigates and seventeen sloops-of-war, besides the transports.
We used to discuss these things at our own mess-tables, vehemently and sometimes quite angrily; but I am sure that I never feared it would go further than it had already gone in the winter of 1832-'33, when the attempt at "nullification" was promptly suppressed by President Jackson's famous declaration, "The Union must and shall be preserved!" and by the judicious management of General Scott.
There was an old rail-fence about the place, and a large pile of boards in front. I immediately engaged four carpenters, and set them at work to make out of these boards mess-tables, benches, black-boards, etc.
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