Our anticipations of worse treatment in consequence of our attempted escape were not realized. Colonel Lee thought the jail was no longer a safe place, and ordered us to be taken to the city barracks. Our apartment here was far more pleasant than our quarters in the jail had been. It was large, well lighted, and provided with a fire-place, which the chilliness of the days (it was now in October) made a great acquisition. It also commanded a view of one of the busiest public squares of Atlanta, and we would sit in the windows, which had no bars across them, and watch the tide of human life that flowed before us, for hours at a time, with an interest that only our long seclusion from the world could have given. Jack Wells, the commander of the barracks, had been an old United States soldier. Being thus brought up under a more honorable system than obtains in the South at present, he did not consider it derogatory to his dignity to treat prisoners kindly. He would come around to our room and talk with us by the hour--telling us great stories of his adventures, and receiving as great in return. Most of the time he was half drunk, and very frequently did not stop at the half way point. In these cases, and when he was in a communicative mood, he would tell us that he did not care a cent which side whipped--that he only held his present position to avoid being conscripted. But his masters knew him to be such a faithful, vigilant officer, and he could so readily control the rude mass who occupied the rebel portion of the barracks, that they readily forgave these little slips of the tongue. We passed our time while here more pleasantly than at any other place in the Confederacy; yet even here, our path was not one of roses. The following incidents will prove this: The Tennesseeans were confined with us, making twenty in all. Our provisions, which were still very scanty, were handed around in a tray. Mr. Pierce, who is mentioned before, one time conceived his allowance to be too small, and threw it back into the tray again. Not a word was spoken on either side; but in a few minutes the guards came up, and, seizing Pierce, took him out of the room into the cold hall, and tying his hands before his knees, with a stick inserted across under his knees and over his arms, in the way that soldiers call "bucking," they left him there all night. This indignity was perpetrated on an old man over sixty!