VICKSBUR& &URIX& THE TROUBLE,

339

and outlast everything else, little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought
I had then ? It was ' the whiskey is saved." And yet, don't you know, it
wa$ kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had
only just that little ; never had another taste during the siege.

* Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and
close. Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it;
no turn ing-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have
made a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night.
Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.

* Twice we had sixteen people in our cave ; and a number of times we

had a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight \ eight be-
longed there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I
don't know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever
rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within
a couple of years. One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved It
in and stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out. Some
of us came near smothering, After that we made two openings—ought fco
have thought of it at first.
Mule meat ? No, we only got down to that the last day or two. Of
course it was good; anything is good when you are starving.*