Connecticut western news., 1882-12-20
THE OLD SOLDIERS.
Two of Them Meet and Exchange a Few
 Yarns.

Peck, of the Milwaukee Sun, tells how he fell in with an old army comrade the other day and adds:
 He told of meeting some of the old boys all the way from New York to Ne braska, and how some of them had struck it rich, and others never caught onto anything. We told of meeting the widow of one of the boys who died in the hospi- tai at Baton Rouge, La., and how, when she said she had never heard word of how he died, nor received news of his death until six months after, and we told her that we sat up with him the night he died, and commanded the squad that fired the salute over his grave next day, and then started on three thousand mile march before getting back to camp, and never knew her address, she tainted away. The lieutenant, who is a railroad conductor now, told of stopping his train to put off tramp one dark night, who could not pay his fare, and just as the boys were going to bounce him, he recognized in him a former officer who had outranked him, and he told the brakemen to hold up, and he. let the tramp ride two hundred miles, and never let the tramp know him for fear his feel ings would be hurt, and how surprised the tramp looked when he got off the train at daylight, at the end of the con- ductor's run, and the conductor handed him five dollar bill Then we told how a galoot at Vicksburg, who run tailor shop, and made uniform for us at war prices, wanted us to pay for it ten years after peace was declared, and he told about a southern girl that wanted to marry him, and he couldn't see it, and i we remembered how us boys used to ride from Carrolton, down to New Or leans, in citizens clothes, and attend the theatres without pass from camp, and the colored provost guard would get after us because somebody gave us away, and we would ride on run all over the city and get shot at, and how one night the officers were all down to the city having a wicked old time, leaving the regiment in command of an orderly sergeant with the chaplain for adviser, and how an or der came from headquarters for the reg iment to take transportation at daylight for Mobile, and the chaplain had to get up at two o'clock in the morning and ride six miles to New Orleans and hunt the town all over for the officers, and though he went to all the saloons in the town he couldn't get officers enough for a mess, until he went to the St. Charles hotel, where he found enough for a quorum playing poker in the colonel's room, and how we scratched gravel and got back to camp and had the regiment on board o steamboat just at daylight exactly, and nobody missed note, though several heads of hair that were not as bald as they are now, pulled pret- ty bad. Then the two fellows, who were so young and full of vinegar seventeen years ago, and who are so old and full of rheumatism now, the seeds of which were sown long ago, sleeping in the mud, and rain, on rails and things, got to talk ing about their big children, and then they separated, the one going to his du- ties hundreds of miles away, and the other sat for an hour, thinking how he had changed since he used to ride races l on bare back horse.