The Daily Green Mountain Freeman

Life on the Mississippi.

The correspondent of the Boston Journal with the Mississippi river expedition gives the following graphic description of one of the foes which the Federal soldiers have to encounter in that region;

"The spring of the year is exceedingly trying to Northern constitutions, more so probably than the summer even. The soldiers are obliged to drink river water, of the composition of which you can have but little conception. Not only up the Tennessee but here we feel the debilitating influences of the season.

Can you eat dirt—more than the single peck, which it is said is allotted by Providence to each individual in life? Can you eat, grease in all its forms—baked, boiled, fried, simmered? Can you bear variegated butter—variable not only in color, but in taste and smell? Can you get along with ham, hash and beans for breakfast, hash ham and beans for dinner, and beans, hash and ham for supper, with fat in all its forms, with cakes sufficiently solid for grape shot to fire at the enemy; with blackest coffee, with the nearest available cow seventy miles distant; with sour molasses for greasy griddles, with Mississippi water to slake your thirst, thick with slime from slaughter houses, sweepings from streets, slops from steamboats, with all the miasma and mold of the forests brought down by the overflow?

If you think you can stand up under this, just come out here and join this expedition, with quarters on a transport such as you would be likely to find. Look in the glass, after a few days, and you will find that fresh countenance of yours, with the venous blood flushing the cheeks, changed to a milk and molasses tint, inclining to the molasses. The pure oxygen which the winds of winter have swept down from the snow-clad summits of Wachusett and Monadnock has been by the marvelous economy of nature transformed into elastic threads and fibres in your system. You feel that a little energy and will would sweep secession out of the Mississippi valley, a task you think as easy of accomplishment as that assigned to the errand boy who cleans out your office in the morning. You remember the terrible giant in the story book of your childhood, who made nothing of eating a dozen men at a breakfast, and feel that secession might be as easily dispatched, but the India rubber fibres lose their elasticity. Energy lags and you become like a wilted cabbage leaf. I speak from experience and observation. Eastern constitutions must be of tough material to stand the exhaustive processes incident to a Mississippi expedition. Perhaps you will call this high colored; rather, I admit, but as I look at the saffron hued countenances of several friends around me, I think it needs no toning down.

Journalists are not the only sufferers. A number of the officers of the fleet are worn out by hard work and the debilitating effects of diet and drink which they are forced to accept.

A regiment of New England troops would be decimated in a short time in this locality. "You must live high," a physician remarked yesterday. He might as well say to a mouse in an exhausted receiver, "you must have a breath of air if you want to live." It was a funny remark Live high in Cairo, or on an expedition down the Mississippi!

I have fallen into this strain partly from personal experience, partly because I see that officers, soldiers and civilians alike succumb before the debilitating influences. There is an odor of decay in the air, a taste of it in the water, you have a solution of mold in every drop brought down from the million of acres of flooded lands. There is death in the cup. There are fearful bills of mortality before us in the future."