Any group of men in a tent would have had more exciting tales to tell.

I needed no fiction when I had Fanny Wright, for instance, daily passing to and fro before my tent, with her shy little girl clinging to her skirts.

Fanny was a modest little mulatto woman, a soldier's wife, and a company laundress.

She had escaped from the main-land in a boat, with that child and another.

Her baby was shot dead in her arms, and she reached our lines with one child safe on earth and the other in heaven.