factory and nourishing; the mush the bulkiest--it made a bigger
show, but did not stay with one so long. The dumplings held an
intermediate position--the water in which they were boiled becoming a
sort of a broth that helped to stay the stomach. We received no salt,
as a rule. No one knows the intense longing for this, when one goes
without it for a while. When, after a privation of weeks we would get a
teaspoonful of salt apiece, it seemed as if every muscle in our bodies
was invigorated. We traded buttons to the guards for red peppers, and
made our mush, or bread, or dumplings, hot with the fiery-pods, in hopes
that this would make up for the lack of salt, but it was a failure.
One pinch of salt was worth all the pepper pods in the Southern
Confederacy. My little squad--now diminished by death from five to
three--cooked our rations together to economize wood and waste of meal,
and quarreled among ourselves daily as to whether the joint stock should
be converted into bread, mush or dumplings. The decision depended upon
the state of the stomach. If very hungry, we made mush; if less
famished, dumplings; if disposed to weigh matters, bread.

This may seem a trifling matter, but it was far from it. We all remember
the man who was very fond of white beans, but after having fifty or sixty
meals of them in succession, began to find a suspicion of monotony in the
provender. We had now six months of unvarying diet of corn meal and
water, and even so slight a change as a variation in the way of combining
the two was an agreeable novelty.

At the end of June there were twenty-six thousand three hundred and
sixty-seven prisoners in the Stockade, and one thousand two hundred--just
forty per day--had died during the month.

CHAPTER XXXI.

DYING BY INCHES--SEITZ, THE SLOW, AND HIS DEATH--STIGGALL AND EMERSON
--RAVAGES ON THE SCURVY.

May and June made sad havoc in the already thin ranks of our battalion.
Nearly a score died in my company--L--and the other companies suffered
proportionately. Among the first to die of my company comrades, was a
genial little Corporal, "Billy" Phillips--who was a favorite with us all.
Everything was done for him that kindness could suggest, but it was of
little avail. Then "Bruno" Weeks--a young boy, the son of a preacher,
who had run away from his home in Fulton County, Ohio, to join us,
succumbed to hardship and privation.

The next to go was good-natured, harmless Victor Seit