ith pendants. We were rather proud of our prison
cuisine. Cooking was also performed on and in an old worn-out
cook-stove, which a few of our millionaires, forming a joint-stock
company for the purpose, had bought for two hundred Confederate dollars
late in the season, and which the kind prison commander had permitted
them to place near the southwest end of the upper room, running the pipe
out of a window. Culinary operations were extensively carried on also in
the open yard outside, about forty feet by twenty, at the northeast end
of the building. Here the officer would build a diminutive fire of chips
or splinters between bricks, and boil or toast or roast his allowance.
We were grouped in messes of five to ten or twelve each. Happy the club
of half a dozen that could get money enough and a big enough kettle to
have their meal prepared jointly.

Such was the case with my own group after the lapse of about two months.
We had been pinched; but one morning Captain Cook came to me with
radiant face and said: "Colonel, I have good news for you. _I_'m going
to run this mess. My folks in New York have made arrangement with
friends in England to supply me with money, and I've just received
through the lines a hundred dollars. We'll live like fighting-cocks!"
Adjt. J. A. Clark, 17th Pa. Cav., was our delighted cook. Shivering for
an hour over the big kettle amid the ice and snow of the back yard, he
would send up word, "Colonel, set the table for dinner." To "set the
table" consisted in sweeping a space six or eight feet square, and
depositing there the plates, wood, tin, or earthen (mine was of wood; it
had cost me a week's labor in carving). The officers already mentioned,
Cook, Clark, Bush, Sprague, with Lieut. E. H. Wilder, 9th N. Y. Cav.,
sit around in the elegant Turkish fashion, or more classical recline
like the ancients in their symposia, each resting on his left elbow,
with face as near as possible to the steaming kettle, that not a smell
may be lost!

Wood was scarce. It was used with most rigid economy. Many joists
overhead had been sawed off by Lieut. Lewis R. Titus of the _Corps
D'Afrique_, using a notched table-knife for a saw. In this way the
Vermont Yankee obtained pieces for cooking, but he weakened the
structure till some officers really feared the roof might come tumbling
about our heads; and I remember that the prison commandant, visiting the
upper room and gazing heavenward, more than once ejaculated irr