eteran brigade, and the gunboat _Michigan_
came and anchored near the island and showed her threatening portholes.

CHAPTER XIII

'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere.
--PAYNE.

If one longs for home while roaming amidst pleasures and palaces, how
much more intense, suppose you, must be the nostalgia of the soldier
confined in a far distant prison?

March 14, 1865, was one of the happiest days of my life. After a
captivity of twenty months, I was led out of the prison with the three
hundred others, conducted to a steamboat, and homeward bound transported
to Sandusky. The thick ice that for three months had covered the bay was
floating in broken pieces on the surface, through which the boat
struggled with so much difficulty that I feared it would be necessary to
put back to the island; but the trip was made at the expense of some
broken paddles. Why we were selected rather than our less fortunate
compatriots I cannot guess, unless it was to save the annoyance and the
expense of burial, for some of our party had been wounded, others as
well as myself, had recently recovered from serious sickness, and all
were adjudged to be unfit for military service; or perhaps there was the
same number in Southern prisons that for special reasons the Federal War
Office desired to have exchanged.

The train that was to convey us southward was made up of box-cars, upon
the floors of which there was a thin covering of straw. We were so
crowded that we all could not lie down at the same time. The sleepers
lay with their heads at the sides of the cars, while their legs
interlaced in the middle. We took the situation in good humor, and slept
by turns, those who could not find room standing amidst entangled legs
and feet. Thus we traveled several days and nights, our train being
frequently switched for the passage of regular trains. Our route was by
Bellaire to Baltimore, or rather to Locust Point, where we took passage
on a steamboat for James river. Having landed the next day, we walked
across a neck of land formed by a bend of the river to the wharf where a
boat from Richmond was expected to meet us. A company of negroes made a
show of conducting us across the neck, though a company of childr