But this troubles me little now. Time enough to attend to it after I get home. That is all I can think of,--_home_, and how to get there.
How I should get there, and whether or not I ever would get there, were questions not easily solved. It is the purpose of this sketch to show some of the beauties of travelling on railroads that are under military control, and especially to set forth the writer's experience in going from Atlanta to Nashville.
It was a terribly hot morning when I reached the depot at Atlanta, amid a cloud of dust and a maze of wagons and mules and commissary stores and frantic teamsters. I threw my valise into the nearest car and hastened to the Provost Marshal's office for my pass. There was an anxious crowd already in waiting: resigned officers and officers on leave; jolly, ragged privates on furlough, eager to see their wives and babies; sutlers and "sheap-cloding" men; flaring demireps, seeking new fields; mouldy citizens in clothes of antique cut, fawning abjectly and addressing every clerk and orderly as "kernel;" dejected darkies, shoved aside by everybody, with no "civil rights bill" to help them. While I was waiting for my turn, the train kept me constantly worried by pulling up and backing down and threatening to leave. At last I found an opportunity to exhibit my "Extract," and, after reading it as slowly and carefully as if it had been a dispatch in cipher, the Provost Marshal very deliberately wrote a pass, read it over two or three times, and then, looking at every one in the room but me, asked "Who's this for?" as if I had not been standing at his elbow with my hand held out for half an hour.
I left the official premises in a highly exasperated state of mind. In the mean time the train had been plunging backward and forward in a wild and aimless way, and I was unable to find the car my valise was in. After much wear and tear of muscle and temper and trousers, in climbing over boxes and bales of hay, I discovered it, and found that it had been taken possession of by a crowd of roystering blades on furlough, whose canteens were full and fragrant, and in whose talk and manner appeared the signs of a boisterous night ahead, with the possibility of a fight or two by way of special diversion. As I was no longer in "the military service of the United States," I was, of course, a peaceable citizen, so I took my quarters in a more peaceful car. It was a cattle-car and not remarkably clean; but the company was good, and through the lattice-work around the upper part of the car one could get a view of the surrounding country; though looking through it gave one a sensation very much like being in a guard-house.