That afternoon Ghormley said he was going to make a break into the bushes and get away. He jumped off his mule and had not gone more than ten feet from the road when a guard spied him and fired six shots into the bushes, when Ghormley came back in a hurry. He told the guard that he only wanted to get some blackberries. He watched him closely after that and told him “the next berries _you_ get will be lead berries.” At the end of the third day we reached Lynchburg, Va., where we were put into an old tobacco warehouse. There were three hundred prisoners there when we arrived. We were quartered on the dirty floor, covered with tobacco dust. You could hear the men sneeze in all languages. Our fare was still one loaf of bread for two men. At this place our largest and strongest man, Henry Benner, a wagon maker from Chillicothe, said “Boys, we will never get out of this alive.” He began to weaken right there, and in three weeks from that time he died of home sickness. We tried to shame him out of it, saying, “You are the healthiest man in the bunch and you will live through it if any one will.” One morning I found him lying dead on the ground, the first one of our little party to go. They kept us at this place for four weeks and then moved us to Richmond, Va. As we marched past Libbey Prison we heard some one calling from an upper window, “Hey! there! old 149th.” It was Major Rozell who had been captured the same morning that we were. In the fight at Berryville the Major was wounded in the elbow and had been taken direct to Libbey. We were not allowed to speak to him and I have never seen him since. I hear that he is still living in Missouri, having received a letter from him some time ago. We remained in Richmond one night, when they took us across the river to Belle Island, where the hardest part of our prison life began. It was a bleak spot, bare of trees. Some few of the prisoners had tattered tents, the majority had none. It rained every day while we were there and the fog was so thick you could almost cut it until about noon, when it would fix for another rain. We had no protection whatever from this weather, and we would walk around in the night in the rain until we fell asleep on the muddy ground. We would lie there until awakened by the intense cold, to get up and walk again. Here they fed us on wild pea soup, flavored with ox tail, without dressing. No napkins went with this course, and the meals were never on time, as it took the cooks an hour or more to skim the maggots off the soup, as they wanted our meals to come to us perfectly clean, so we could not tell our folks at home that they did not understand their business.