The ration supplied us consisted of cornmeal, rice, and sorghum. The rations were issued to last ten days. They amounted to about a pint of meal a day, a tenth of a pint of rice, and a gill of sorghum. The cornmeal was sometimes good, sometimes it was wormy, sometimes it consisted of the corn and the cob ground up together. The meal was cooked in the way I have described, and twice a day we had a piece of the size I have mentioned. Sometimes we would save our rice and sorghum, and have what we considered a feast. At other times we would sell the sorghum, through the guard, to somebody outside the prison, in exchange for cow-peas, and out of these peas a soup would be made. Of course, it consisted of nothing but the peas boiled in water. We had no meat and no salt. When such an exchange was made, we had the luxury of a pint of this soup. As I have said, I had no change of clothing, so when I indulged in the luxury of washing day, I had to go without underclothing until my clothes were dry. Of course, each man had to wash his own clothes. Every now and then it came my turn to wash the floor, and clean up the room as best I could. Retiring at night, consisted in sweeping the floor. We went to bed, of course, upon the floor, wearing the clothes that we had worn during the day. I was fortunate enough to procure a log of wood out in the jail-yard, which I utilized as a pillow, folding up my coat and placing it on top of the wood to make my pillow more comfortable. Of course time hung heavy on our hands. We therefore tried to while it away by engaging in games of various kinds. We clubbed together and bought a pack of cards, paying fifteen dollars for them, and they were very poor cards at that. Some one of our number made a checker and chess-board out of a square piece of plank, and whittled out rough checkers and chessmen. We used to tell stories, and indulged largely in telling what we would like to have to eat, and what we would have if we ever got out of that place. I often dreamed at night of having magnificent banquets, and that seemed to be the case with my fellow-prisoners, for we frequently told each other in the morning of the splendid repasts we had had in our dreams. The naval officers of whom I have spoken, some fourteen in number, having been there for a year, and having received their pay in gold regularly, by an arrangement made with the Confederate government on the part of Admiral Dahlgren, had been able to purchase a good many things. They had supplied themselves with a number of books. They had Sir Walter Scott's novels, they had Don Quixote and Gil Blas. The two latter I borrowed of them, and read them in the prison with great interest. Some of the men in the room in which I was having learned that I knew something of Latin, asked me if I would not undertake to teach them Latin, so I obtained from these naval officers a Latin grammar and a Latin Prose Composition, and established a class in Latin. So in one way and