The Thirteenth Maine was put to a cruel test by being placed, in our already weak physical condition, in the malarial swamps of Southern Louisiana, in mid-summer, and kept there for more than a year. And, alas! too, too many heroic souls sleep beneath the soil that once echoed to the tread of millions of human slaves. But we never forgot that we belonged to the ‘Lord's Country’—never forgot who we were, and what. Even when, one foggy night, Sentinel Swaney shot the quartermaster's mule because it would not obey his challenge to halt, it was credited to his vigilance. And when a soldier tumbled off the draw-bridge into the moat among the alligators, it furnished amusement for the entire garrison—his little dog barking in unison. A few days later the pet dog was ‘gathered in’ by an alligator.
I apprehend that no troops scanned the orders of their department commander more critically or with more complete satisfaction than did we during all these months when the saintly sinners in New Orleans were devoutly praying for the advent of yellow fever, while we, from the head of the roster to the foot, were prayerfully working to render its approach impossible.
In New Orleans General Butler organized a brigade of ‘contrabands,’ prisoners, and the odds and ends of every nationality, armed with picks, shovels, hoes, brooms, and mule carts. which, under competent officers, proceeded to remove inches, and in some localities feet, of the accumulation of a century of fever-breeding material from almost the entire surface within the limits of the city. I do not know that the natives had a vision of a new heaven, but I am sure that there dawned on their Astonished
