THE IMMORTAL SIX HUNDRED
together, and now one was going home, the other to remain a captive. We were saying good-bye, telling those we left behind to be of good heart, that it would be but a few days before they would join us in Dixie. We of that six hundred can now look back and laugh at the promises then made, some of them of the most impossible character. I recall one promise made in which we were all in accord. That was, just as soon as we put foot in Richmond we were all to go in a body to President Davis and Congress and demand that our comrades in Fort Delaware should be sent for at once. The fact that it would require the consent of the United States Government to carry out this promise never entered our head. Some of the partings between mess-mates and friends, on that August day in the long ago, come back to me most vividly as I write. There were men who had stood together in the line of death, comrades in the army, companions in prison, but now to be separated, perchance forever. I re-
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