Having been divided in these rooms, we organized ourselves into messes, there being a mess in each room. Each mess detailed men from its number to do the cooking. We appointed the highest officer of our number in the prison, Colonel Marshall, as provost marshal. He appointed a lieutenant as adjutant, who kept a roster and detailed two men every day in each of the rooms to do police duty. Their duty was to sweep the floor, and to scrub it when necessity required. No broom was supplied us. We therefore had to purchase one. The men in the room in which I was, clubbed together and bought a broom, of very inferior quality, for which we paid five dollars in Confederate money. There was a tub belonging to the room, very roughly made, in which we brought up water from the yard below whenever we found it necessary to wash the floor. We would dash the water over the floor, and then scrub it with the broom. We were allowed out in the prison yard each day, at daylight in the morning for an hour, and again in the afternoon for an hour. During the morning hour we all gathered around the one faucet in the yard, to perform our morning ablutions. There were some one hundred and twenty of us, as I remember, and of course we could not all engage in this process at the same time. The cooks were allowed to go into the brick house of which I have spoken, long before daylight, where they built a fire with wood supplied by the Confederate government, and proceeded to fill a wash-boiler connected with the cook-stove, with water, which they heated and stirred in the corn meal supplied us as the chief article of our diet. This they afterwards baked in two dripping pans, these being the only cooking utensils which the building contained. After they had finished baking this corn-bread, they divided it into pieces about as large as one's hand and perhaps an inch or two thick, and spread it out on boards, which they brought up into the prison about eight or nine o'clock in the morning. A piece of this bread and a tin cup full of cold water constituted our breakfast. When I entered the prison I had nothing with me but the clothes I had on, and a tooth brush and a small pocket comb. At the time I was taken prisoner I had some twenty or twenty-five dollars in greenbacks, and this I exchanged for Confederate money, through one of the guard placed over us, receiving, as I remember, some fifteen or twenty dollars for each dollar of the currency of the United States. With this money I bought me a pint tin cup, paying five dollars for it, Confederate money. A naval officer who had been captured at Fort Sumter a year previous to our imprisonment, and who was also in this prison, gave me a small caseknife and a fork made of the handle of a toothbrush. A fellow prisoner who was ingenious with the jackknife, carved a tablespoon out of a piece of wood, of which he made me a present. These articles constituted my kit.