midnight
It was on Wednesday that my architectural steed , the Gothic Pegasus , renewed his usual weekly journey to desolated Accomac , cheerfully conveying me thither at a speed that did not keep the same roadside house in view more than half an hour at a time . Having hitched the funereal stallion to a copy of Senator Sumner 's recent Faneuil Hall speech , believing that document sufficiently heavy to hold him , I gave him a discarded straw-hat of mine for his dinner , and strolled into the Mackerel camp . To the everlasting disgrace of our rulers be it said , my boy , I found the devoted Mackerel Brigade progressing toward deep suffering at a rate which made me thank Heaven that I owned no chickens within sight of the harrowing scene . Being thoughtlessly supplied with three days ' rations at a time , these neglected martyrs incur all the perils of suffocation and cruel nightmare by doing nothing on the first day but eat from morning till night , what is left over at midnight being used to pelt each other with . Then for two whole days these gallant men who are fighting our battles find famine staring them in the face , and I actually heard one emaciated Mackerel chap offering a whole week 's pay to another Mackerel chap for a Confederate cracker which he had picked up in a field , wishing to consign that cracker to his friends at home as a sample of the unnatural food with which an ungrateful Republic feeds its faithful soldiers . I even found many Mackerels without knapsacks and blankets , which they had lost in adventures at `` Old Sledge '' ; and there was that in the countenances of others which sured me that their poor faces had not been washed since the commencement of the war ! My soul turns sick at these things , my boy , and they even have an effect upon a beholder 's stomach .