While on the subject of "grub," who of us does not think of our efficient "boss" cook, Tom Potts? Can not each of us see him now in this camp behind Missionary Ridge. There he sits day and night (except perhaps 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. when he sleeps) in his split bottom chair, in front of the center pole of his tent. Behind him his wall tent, each side piled up with boxes and barrels and sacks of meal, flour, salt, sugar, bacon, the only man in camp who always has a good tent because it is absolutely a necessity. A tall, slouch-shouldered man, wide brim felt hat, black hair almost to his shoulders, complexion very dark, long black moustache and whiskers and eternally, when awake, a big black meerschaum in his mouth, puffing away. Very quiet, slow soft spon, he occasionally gives some directions about the cooking to the negroes and to the white soldiers detailed to cook. He is nothing of a hustler, but he has directed negroes from his boyhood up and is as efficient a "boss cook" as the army contained without any bluster. Six or eight feet in front of him, a big hickory oak fire, say ten feet long, with glowing coals under the logs, skillets, ovens and pots all occupied in baking bread or boiling beef under the hands of the negro men, who delighted in the work and joke and grin and laugh or jump out and dance part of a jig, whilst another claps his hands and pats knees for the music. Occasionally Potts may quietly say to his negro man, "Jim" I wish you would hand me a cup of water." He keeps his seat, drinks, hands back the cup and goes on smoking. No man in the army has a better colored meerschaum. On the march or while the army was in the trenches, rations are issued, cooked, the bread being baked and the beef boiled, bacon or salt pork is issued raw, the soldiers eating it raw, or boiled on coals, if convenient and the meat not too scant. In permanent camp, the soldiers drew the rations raw or cooked as they preferred almost always each mess preferred to do its own cooking. With us confederates, bread was mostly corn pone, sometimes biscuits, sometimes hard-tack. Cold cornbread or hard-tack crumbled into a tin can and boiled with perhaps a few scraps of meat was "cush" and "cush" tasted good, hot off the coals, after a hard day's march or fighting.