Camp Sedgewick.      

Near Brandy Station Va.

Feb. 14. 1864.

                       

Dear Sister.

                                    It. Valentine's day, and I wonder if you or some other good looking young gal aint going to send me a valentine. I spect you are writing to me today and shall expect when I open it to find a little linen thread in it. thats all the valentine I shall expect anyway. Do the Sundays come around as often in South Milford to you as they do here to me? It seems as if I write to Sally as often as every other day and yet I dont write any other days than Sundays. It must be I think that they leave out the middle days altogether and put in only those at each end. How many more Sundays between now and the sixth of June? sixteen is it. I guess it must be if it was seventeen a week ago today. 

 

The wind is blowing like the old boy today. the dirt keeps lighting on my paper every minute that finds its way in through the cracks in the door and down chimney I have just covered up my plate of butter as it was getting pretty well peppered up with specks of dirt. The wind drives the smoke into the tent too so I guess I shall be obliged to let the fire go down. The Major said I had got a pretty good looking house this morning when he inspected the quarters and I think so too for the kind of life we are living. I should want one a little better living in the old bay state.

 

The weather is getting a little too settled just now to suit us, the roads are getting to be too passable If it was the spring of the year and the proper time for settled weather it would be all well enough, but it is likely to make us have an extra march or an extra something, at a time when we may get caught in a snow storm or get stuck in the mud like Burnside last winter at Bank's Ford on the Rappahannock so for that reason we dont like to see too fine weather /

 

Did you ever in your travels know a person by the name of Stephen Bates of Bellingham I think he is cousin to Henry and Lewis Bates. I dont know his father's name. He is acting as Sergeant Major while Eastabrooks is home on his furlough. he is a pretty good sort of a fellow as far as I know but he's black enough to pull up corn. He was asking me yesterday about Henry and Lewis. Then Elton is a V.V. is he. I didnt think he would reenlist. Who offered him a commission in a nigger regt do you know? It is not every man that can get a commission in a black regiment. almost one half that apply for an appointment fail to pass examination in Washington and of course fail in getting a commission. quite a number of officers in this regiment resigned here for the purpose of getting a step higher in the Fourteenth R.I. heavy artillery but in doing so they lost what they had here, and did not succeed in getting through the examination at Washington there they was out in the cold and liable to a draft and sent back into the same regt as privates. One lieut that was rejected has since made out to get back into his old place again with his old rank. /

 

Well our old veterans left here last Wednesday for the North. I am glad they have gone for I dont like to do duty for another persons duty and he in camp at the same time. I will do it willingly while they are away, but while they are here it goes against the grain. I have my own duty to do and act occasionally as sergeant. Wednesday I had thirty one men under "my command" through the day and night. what do you think of that aint I some pumpkins in this army of the Po-to-mac.

 

I had a letter night before last from Mary Cook. It seems she has got back to Hard scrabble again she says Mary Wilkinson has finished her school and is visiting at her fathers. look here I want to see if you are good yet for guessing. I got a paper (Milford Journal) Thursday night (and it wasnt the first one I have received) with the initials N.E.C. signed to it. now you wont laugh will you. I shouldnt wonder if my sight was good yet, if the schoolmaam does run off, but I am afraid it will be awful poor if the time ever does come when anything happens there more than what turns up. Is there any squirming in your neighborhood nowadays owing to Uncle Abrams last literary production or in other words his call for 500,000 specimens of the "genus homo". But I must close, I am alone today, Loomis being away on picket. I am anxious to hear from the schoolmaam yet and to know how you succeed in that little surprise you have undertaken L.C.C.

 

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I take a look occasionally at my collection of pictures I should like to have John's here, as he looked when he was driving cattle from Brighton, the day he got his clothes torn off in the woods, does he remember it.

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