Semi Weekly Standard

Words of Comfort.

A correspondent of the Confederate who belongs to the Home Guards, writes as follows to that paper from Kinston:

"The blueness of the three beef shanks furnished seventeen of us for one day's rations, defies comparison; the almost jetty blackness of the wretched compound made from the spout of a smut machine called flour, beggars description. Some body ought to be hung: either the miller who put up such stuff, or the A. Q. M. who purchased it for the army. No man or dog on earth can eat thereof for a week and live. This is no idle complaint: some of us are old soldiers and have lived roughly, but this is wholly unbearable."

Whereupon the Confederate utters the following words of comfort:

"The rations will be bad to begin with, but better will come round in time. It is better to begin at the bottom of the ladder and go up, than at top and come down. Our friends are having about as bad times now as they are likely to have.

Could the fare be worse, if what the correspondent says be true? "No man or dog on earth can eat thereof for a week and live." Why are these men treated in this way? The Confederates of Raleigh draw their fine flour and corn meal, their lard, their sugar, their wood, and their bacon, at low rates, and some of them, we learn, sell their bacon at high rates to our shopkeepers; but our soldiers in camp are put off with what—as this correspondent says—would kill a dog. But one of the organs of the Governor assures them that their fare will be no worse! Very consoling, indeed.