The camp would be silent and still.
Little groups everywhere hovered for hours, moody and sullen, over diminutive, flickering fires, made with one poor handful of splinters.
When the sun shone, more activity was visible.

Boys wandered around, hunted up their friends, and saw what gaps death--always busiest during the cold spells--had made in the ranks of their acquaintances.

During the warmest part of the day everybody disrobed, and spent an hour or more killing the lice that had waxed and multiplied to grievous proportions during the few days of comparative immunity.
Besides the whipping of the Galvanized by the darkies, I remember but two other bits of amusement we had while at Florence.

One of these was in hearing the colored soldiers sing patriotic songs, which they did with great gusto when the weather became mild.

The other was the antics of a circus clown--a member, I believe, of a Connecticut or a New York regiment, who, on the rare occasions when we were feeling not exactly well so much as simply better than we had been, would give us an hour or two of recitations of the drolleries with which he was wont to set the crowded canvas in a roar.