It was the first that we had since that which I stole in Wirz's headquarters, in June -- nine months before.

We felt that the dirt which had accumulated upon us since then would subject us to assessment as real estate if we were in the North.
Hurrying off to a little creek we began our ablutions, and it was not long until Andrews declared that there was a perceptible sand-bar forming in the stream, from what we washed off.

Dirt deposits of the Pliocene era rolled off feet and legs.

Eocene incrustations let loose reluctantly from neck and ears; the hair was a mass of tangled locks matted with nine months' accumulation of pitch pine tar, rosin soot, and South Carolina sand, that we did not think we had better start in upon it until we either had the shock cut off, or had a whole ocean and a vat of soap to wash it out with.
After scrubbing until we were exhausted we got off the first few outer 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.