layers--the post tertiary formation, a geologist would term it--and the
smell of many breakfasts cooking, coming down over the hill, set our
stomachs in a mutiny against any longer fasting.

We went back, rosy, panting, glowing, but happy, to get our selves some
breakfast.

Should Providence, for some inscrutable reason, vouchsafe me the years of
Methuselah, one of the pleasantest recollections that will abide with me
to the close of the nine hundredth and sixty-ninth year, will be of that
delightful odor of cooking food which regaled our senses as we came back.
From the boiling coffee and the meat frying in the pan rose an incense
sweeter to the senses a thousand times than all the perfumes of far
Arabia. It differed from the loathsome odor of cooking corn meal as much
as it did from the effluvia of a sewer.

Our noses were the first of our senses to bear testimony that we had
passed from the land of starvation to that of plenty. Andrews and I
hastened off to get our own breakfast, and soon had a half-gallon of
strong coffee, and a frying-pan full, of meat cooking over the fire--not
one of the beggarly skimped little fires we had crouched over during our
months of imprisonment, but a royal, generous fire, fed with logs instead
of shavings and splinters, and giving out heat enough to warm a regiment.

Having eaten positively all that we could swallow, those of us who could
walk were ordered to fall in and march over to Wilmington. We crossed
the branch of the river on a pontoon bridge, and took the road that led
across the narrow sandy island between the two branches, Wilmington being
situated on the opposite bank of the farther one.