June 4 — A preacher from Massachusetts preached for us to-day. Preaching is a good thing when it is well done and its axioms and truths are well adhered to and its injunctions practiced. I wish that some great minister would come along here and preach a kind of redemption that would have the potential effect of getting us away from here, for Death is still swinging its fatal scythe with a deadlier stroke in this patch than it does beyond these prison gates, and many a man in here to-day will go through the prison gate dressed in a coffin before we all get out.
The weather is warm now and in a favorable condition for the musical buzz of the green fly that is already busy at its favorite occupation of blowing everything that it sees which suits its taste. The fresh beef rations that we get are some days full of the little fly’s life-giving work neatly and evenly deposited in every little interstice throughout the ration, and so numerous, and too tedious to extract with any degree of satisfaction, that we eat the meat, fly-blow and all in conjunction, without any squeamish hesitation whatever, as this is no time nor place for the indulgence of bodily idiosyncrasy, fastidious appetite, or exquisite taste. Some of my comrades think that we might get the bots by eating hatchable fly-blow, but I know that I have eaten a thousand in the last month and I feel no sign of any bots yet.
