Up to this time our sleep and diet had
been severely scanty.
We stayed all next day at Annapolis. The Boston brought the
Massachusetts Eighth ashore that night. Poor fellows! what a figure they
cut, when we found them bivouacked on the Academy grounds next morning!
To begin: They had come off in hot patriotic haste, half-uniformed and
half-outfitted. Finding that Baltimore had been taken by its own loafers
and traitors, and that the Chesapeake ferry was impracticable, had
obliged them to change line of march. They were out of grub. They were
parched dry for want of water on the ferry-boat. Nobody could decipher
Caucasian, much less Bunker-Hill Yankee, in their grimy visages.
But, hungry, thirsty, grimy, these fellows were GRIT.
Massachusetts ought to be proud of such hardy, cheerful, faithful sons.
We of the Seventh are proud, for our part, that it was our privilege to
share our rations with them, and to begin a fraternization which grows
closer every day and will be _historical_.
But I must make a shorter story. We drilled and were reviewed that
morning on the Academy parade.
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