Sometimes a face, black or white, peers through the entrance with some message.

Since the light readily penetrates, though the rain cannot, the tent conveys a feeling of charmed security, as if an invisible boundary checked the pattering drops and held the moaning wind.

The front tent I share, as yet, with my adjutant; in the inner apartment I reign supreme, bounded in a nutshell, with no bad dreams.
In all pleasant weather the outer "fly" is open, and men pass and repass, a chattering throng.

I think of Emerson's Saadi, "As thou sittest at thy door, on the desert's yellow floor,"-- for these bare sand-plains, gray above, are always yellow when upturned, and there seems a tinge of Orientalism in all our life.
Thrice a day we go to the plantation-houses for our meals, camp-arrangements being yet very imperfect.

The officers board in different messes, the adjutant and I still clinging to the household of William Washington,--William the quiet and the courteous, the pattern of house-servants, William the noiseless, the observing, the discriminating, who knows everything that can be got, and how to cook it.