disease in almost every way, and had slept with this man while he was taking it, and after he returned from the small-pox hospital with his sores but partially healed up, remained perfectly free of it.

I thought if I must have it, I must, and there was an end of the matter; there being no way of avoiding it that I could see; and I do not know but the late vaccination, while the disease was already thickly scattered about the house, increased the danger of contagion by throwing the blood into a fever of the same kind; while by leaving the blood undisturbed, if the disease was not intercepted, the chances of taking it were at least not augmented.

We left Danville in April, 1864, having been confined there about five months. Although confined very closely, and our liberties few, upon the whole, Danville was the best-provided prison I was in; the rations of food being larger and more wholesome than at any other prison. It is true that the buckets of pea-soup swam with bugs, but that was a peculiarity of that savory dish at all the prisons of the South. We became accustomed to drinking the soup, bugs and all, without any compunctions of delicacy about it, and our only and sincere wish was for more of the same kind. Many a time did I pick these bugs from between my teeth without any commotion in my stomach whatever,—save of hunger. A man becomes accustomed to this way of living, and loses all sense of delicacy regarding his food. Quantity is the only question to be considered, quality being an object so unimportant as to be entirely lost sight of.

We arrived at Andersonville, Ga., five days after leaving Danville. We had a very uncomfortable journey, being penned up in freight cars, seventy-five in a car, and not allowed to get out but once during the whole journey. We changed cars once on the route, and this was the only opportunity we had of stretching our limbs during the entire trip.

I now ask the reader to allow me to pause a few moments to take breath and gather strength and courage for the task before me.

CHAPTER II.

Andersonville! Dread word! Dread name for cruelty, and patriots’ graves, I stand paralyzed before thy horrid gates! Thou grim Leviathan of Death! I feel heart-sick as I approach thee! I feel how powerless I am to tell thy horrible story, thou monster monument of Inhumanity in the nation’s history! I feel thy fangs while yet I descry thy hideous form through the mazy scope of years! I carry thy stings, and the grave alone shall hide the scars upon the marred and shattered body thou hast sacrificed, as a tree stripped of its fruit and foliage!

After being counted into detachments and nineties by the commandant, the notorious Captain Wirz, we were marched into the prison. Heavens! what a sight met our gaze as we marched into that enclosure of destruction! Lying between the stockade and the dead-line, was a long line of corpses, which was necessarily one of the first objects our eyes rested upon as we entered the prison gates.

There they lay, nearly naked in their rags, but the frames—but the bones and skin of men—with their upturned, wildly-ghastly, staring faces, and wide-open eyes.

This was a terrible greeting indeed; and it sent a feeling of dismay to our very souls, and after that a deep sense of despair seemed to settle upon us. We had at last met death face to face. On looking around, we saw the men whose comrades these dead men had been. They all looked alike, and we could not fail to observe the resemblance between the dead and the living. These men were from Belle Island, a rebel prison, which stands unrivalled in the history of the world for cruelty to human beings. I fervently thank God that it pleased Him that I should not be confined there. These poor, wretched men, who had been there, and who preceded us at Andersonville, were the most ghastly-looking living human beings that the eye of man ever beheld. They were nothing but skin and bone. Living skeletons. In color perfectly black. They had no shelter, and smoked themselves black over their pitch-pine fires. The limited time they survived our arrival they spent in cooking, and sitting haunched up over their little fires. They died so rapidly that, before we were aware of it, not one could be seen in the camp. They became ripe for the stroke of the sickle, all of them about the same time, and their Father gathered them to His abundant harvest.

From the misfortunes of these men we took some consolation, strange as it may appear. When witnessing the terrible mortality among them, we said, “Oh, it is only the Belle Islanders that are dying.”

As soon as we had to some extent shaken off the depressing influence exerted upon us by the knowledge of the horrible condition of the Belle Islanders, we began to encourage ourselves with the idea that our fate would not be like theirs; that we had not been on Belle Island, nor experienced the terrible sufferings from exposure and starvation which they had been subjected to, and that, therefore, the mortality could not be so great among us as it had been among them. But we reckoned without having the least conception of what possibilities there were in the future. True, we had fared much better than the Belle Island men. We had not been so exposed to the weather, and had not suffered as much from insufficient quantity of food; we had been able to keep ourselves in better sanitary condition. We were much cleaner and better off in every way, to all appearances. But, as I remarked before, we had not the least comprehension of the possibilities of the future. We had no intimation whatever of the monster of destruction that lay sleeping in our systems, and floating torpidly about in our veins. But the awful knowledge was to dawn upon us soon, and unmistakably. Scurvy—a disease so awful and so dread, that its name to a man in such a place was but another name for death—was destined to break out among us. This disease made its appearance three months after our arrival at Andersonville. Up to that time, knowing nothing of this, suspecting nothing of the kind, we enjoyed our lives better than we had any time since our capture.

During the first few months of our sojourn at Andersonville, the Confederates allowed us a sufficient quantity of food to support life. We were also comparatively free and unconfined, were out of doors, had room to walk about, and could see the shady forest. This was a great relaxation from, and improvement upon, hard walls. The rebels also—as they issued us raw rations—allowed us to get wood to cook with, and for the purpose of making shelter. For a short time, then,—and it was a short time, indeed, compared to the long term of our imprisonment,—we were happier than we had been during all of our previous captivity. But no man was ever happy long in rebel prisons, and the period of our bliss was of but short duration. Not only did men die of the scurvy as fast as the snow melts in spring, but other misfortunes befell us. Or rather, these last came in the shape of Southern barbarities; but although they were barbarities in those who inflicted them, they were serious misfortunes to the Yankee prisoners. It seemed, no