Dear Mother,

I received your last letter yesterday and was glad to hear from you.  I have got a pretty bad cold just now.  The weather is very changeable now.  Most everyone has a bad cold.  Yesterday was my birthday. It is snowing today.  I have received your other three letters.  You must not think that I am forgetting you by delaying to write so long.   There is nothing of interest occurred about here since the last move.  The 9th Army Corps has gone to Newport News.  The army has all been paid off.  We were paid nearly two months.

We are going to be changed to a “Flying Battery”.  The canoniers will all be mounted.  As for the morals of the regulars, they are much better than the volunteers. They are a quiet and sober set of fellows as could be got together.

You wrote that Fred Aldrich was at home.  He never was within two hundred miles of Bull Run.  He was discharged at Newport News Hospital.  He was as big a coward as ever breathed.  He never was in but one engagement and then he laid behind a log and loaded for others.

The army likes Joe Hooker.  He is trying to get the good will of his army by a plentiful supply of soft bread.  I think it is the best plan of any, but if McClellan was placed in command, the army would fight a great deal better.  There is no man that could move the army across the river at Fredericksburg again except McClellan.  They have such confidence in him that they would go anywhere.

I don’t think of much more to write, so goodbye,