llard stalks and was on
his way back before the guard could make up his mind to fire upon him.
The swiftness of his motions saved his life, for had he been more
deliberate the guard would have concluded he was trying to, escape, and
shot him down. As it was he was returning back before the guard could
get his gun up. The onions he had, secured were to us more delicious
than wine upon the lees. They seemed to find their way into every fiber
of our bodies, and invigorate every organ. The collard stalks he had
snatched up, in the expectation of finding in them something resembling
the nutritious "heart" that we remembered as children, seeking and,
finding in the stalks of cabbage. But we were disappointed. The stalks
were as dry and rotten as the bones of Southern, society. Even hunger
could find no meat in them.

After some days of this leisurely journeying toward the South, we halted
permanently about eighty-six miles from Savannah. There was no reason
why we should stop there more than any place else where we had been or
were likely to go. It seemed as if the Rebels had simply tired of
hauling us, and dumped us, off. We had another lot of dead, accumulated
since we left Savannah, and the scenes at that place were repeated.

The train returned for another load of prisoners.

CHAPTER LXV.

BLACKSHEAR AND PIERCE COUNTRY--WE TAKE UP NEW QUARTERS, BUT ARE CALLED
OUT FOR EXCHANGE--EXCITEMENT OVER SIGNING THE PAROLE--A HAPPY JOURNEY TO
SAVANNAH--GRIEVOUS DISAPPOINTMENT

We were informed that the place we were at was Blackshear, and that it
was the Court House, i. e., the County seat of Pierce County. Where they
kept the Court House, or County seat, is beyond conjecture to me, since I
could not see a half dozen houses in the whole clearing, and not one of
them was a respectable dwelling, taking even so low a standard for
respectable dwellings as that afforded by the majority of Georgia houses.

Pierce County, as I have since learned by the census report, is one of
the poorest Counties of a poor section of a very poor State.
A population of less than two thousand is thinly scattered over its five
hundred square miles of territory, and gain a meager subsistence by a
weak simulation of cultivating patches of its sandy dunes and plains in
"nubbin" corn and dropsical sweet potatos. A few "razor-back" hogs
--a species so gaunt and thin that I heard a man once declare that he had
stopped a lot belonging to a ne