day and night, for the slightest alarm; for at first we had only the shattered remnants—of two regiments the Twenty-sixth Alabama and the Fifty-fifth Georgia—numbering in all some three hundred and fifty men. This constituted the guard. In about ten days thereafter my regiment the First Georgia reserves, composed of young boys and old men (I was not sixteen), just organized—were sent to take the place of the Twenty-sixth Alabama and Fifty-fifth Georgia, so they could be sent to the front for duty. In a few days after our arrival the 2d, 3d and 4th Georgia reserves, all composed of lads and hoary-headed men (for we were reduced to the strait of "robbing the cradle and the grave for men to make soldiers of"), joined us as rapidly as they could be organized. The author of "Jaunt in the South" says "When the stockade was occupied in 1864, there was not a tree or blade of grass within it. Its redish sand was entirely barren, and not the smallest particle of green showed itself. But now the surface is covered completely with underbrush; a rich growth of bushes, trees and plants has covered the entire area, and where before was a dreary desert, there is now a wild and luxurious garden." I have before said the ground was covered with a pine forest, and the trees were utilized to build the stockade. Any one who has traveled south of Macon, Georgia, knows the pine is abundant, and in fact almost the only tree. In these forests the ground is covered by wire grass or other grass peculiar to them.
WHY ANDERSONVILLE WAS SELECTED.
The main reasons for locating the prison at Andersonvillle, after its first being thought the most secure place in the Confederacy from Yankee cavalry raids, was the abundance of the water and the timber wherewith to construct the prison rapidly, and its being in the very heart of the grain-growing region of the South, which would make it less inconvenient to supply with provisions such a vast multitude.
MALICIOUS EXHIBITION IN OHIO STATE CAPITOL.
In the summer of 1867, I set out for New York, being resolved to live no longer in the South, where negroes were being placed over us by Yankee bayonets, and in their vernacular, "de bottom rail wuz agittin' on de top er de fence." I traveled very leisurely, and stopped in every city of any note on my route, and kept eyes and ears wide open to drink in everything. I visited the Ohio State capitol at Columbus, and in the museum of curiosities were some small paper boxes carefully preserved in a glass case, containing what purported to have been the exact quality and quantity of rations issued per diem to each prisoner at Andersonville. In one box was about a pint of coarse unbolted meal, and in another about one tablespoonful of rice; and still another box with about two tablespoonsful of black peas; and in a tiny little box was about one-eighth of a teaspoon of salt. Underneath it is all explained, and
