Everyone is learning caution, but there are mortalities still, as with S. B. Harris of "H" who is hit in the head and killed on the 23rd. It is fair to suppose that Union sharpshooters are just as vigilant as their opponents, and that Death visits, with no show of partiality, both blue and gray. As the stay in these advanced trenches has not savored at all of rest, any change seems desirable, hence orders to move early in the morning of the 24th are heard with pleasure and, before daylight, we are off to the left to take the places of Second Corps men who had gone still further to the left, while the Ninth Corps moves into our vacated places. One very careful observer states that we lost our way and had to back and fill, as it were, at one time coming near running into the enemy, who kept up an almost constant shelling during the change. There seems to be less activity among the sharpshooters, for which the soldiers are duly grateful. To-day the original members of the Twelfth Massachusetts, the Fletcher Webster Regiment, long in the Second Brigade of our Division, draw out of line and start for home. The recruits, re-enlisted and drafted men of the Twelfth are to become a part of the Thirty-ninth. The coming into our ranks of one hundred and twenty-five men from the returning Twelfth, is the crowning incident of the 25th. One hundred and six more men are nominally transferred, but they are absent on sick leave, in rebel prisons or elsewhere, and those received to-day, represent about all the real additions to come from our friends who, after three years of arduous labor, are homeward bound. The new position of the Regiment is across the Petersburg & Norfolk Railroad and the depleted condition of the 39th, following the campaign, is evident from the fact that eighteen of the men from the Twelfth Regiment, added to those left in Company C of the Thirty-ninth, called for just forty three rations in the entire company.
It was not lack of excitement which prompted a certain Company A man to a prank which afforded him and his comrades a deal of pleasure, rather was it a desire for something out of the ordinary that, in the midst of this, the severest campaign in the progress of the war, suggested to him a variation. Taking pencil and paper, he wrote, "I should be happy to correspond with any young lady so disposed; address G. W. Cheney, Company A, 39th Regt., M. V. M., Second Brigade, Third Division, Fifth Army Corps, Army of the Potomac." Thinking the idea too good to be kept secret, he read it to the boys around the campfire who were delighted with the plan and he had to write another, couched thus, "I would be pleased to correspond with young ladies, 18 to 22, with view to matrimony." Both of the ads were sent to the Boston Herald and the writer thinks they were the first of the kind ever inserted there. Two weeks later, or after the ads had had time to circulate, the mail brought one hundred and six answers, representing every state then in the Union; long letters, short and pithy ones, some perfumed and embossed; no end of good advice, love, kisses, merry, sporting fun and blessings; it was understood that the Colonel's good wife was quite horrified at seeing the ad and there must have been some uxorious advice to Colonel Davis since, though the next mail had over two hundred letters for the advertisers, they were all destroyed on the pretext that there were no such persons in the Regiment as those addressed. This however did not prevent the enterprising young men doing extensive corresponding over their own names.