Morning came and we bade a long, but not a sad, farewell to that Sacred City. We crossed the Savannah River into the sacred soil of South Carolina. Hamburg, the scene of the Rebel Gen. Butler’s Massacre of negroes during Ku-Klux times, lies opposite Augusta. Onward we went, our old engine puffing and wheezing like a heavy horse, for by this time the engines on Southern railroads began to show the need of the mechanics who had been driven north by the war. Along in the afternoon of the 21st, while we were yet about 60 miles from Columbia, S. C., the old engine gave out entirely and we were compelled to wait for an engine from Columbia. We arrived at Columbia sometime in the night and as we were in passenger cars we did not suffer a great deal of fatigue from our long ride. On the morning of the 22d as our train was leaving the depot a car ran off the track which delayed us until noon. While the train men were getting the car back on the track, I went with a guard down into the city to buy rations, but not a loaf of bread nor an ounce of meat could I procure. Columbia was a beautiful city. I never saw such flower gardens and ornamental shrubbery as I saw there, but you may be sure that I did not cry when I heard that it was burned down. I don’t know whether any of those brutes who refused to sell me bread for starving, wounded men, were burned or not, if they were, they got a foretaste of their manifest destiny. We arrived at Raleigh, N. C., on the morning of the 23rd. Here we had rations issued to us, consisting of bacon and hard tack, and of all the HARD tack I ever saw, that was the hardest. We could not bite it, neither could we break it with our hands until soaked in cold water. At Weldon, on the Roanoke River, we laid over until the morning of the 24th. Here we had a chance to wash and rest and we needed both very much. We reached Petersburg, Va., during the night of the 24th and were marched from the Weldon depot through the city and across the Appomattox River to the Richmond depot, where we waited until morning. Midday found us within sight of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. As the train ran upon the long bridge which crosses the James River at the upper part of the Falls, we looked to our left, and there, lying peacefully in that historic river, was Belle Isle, a literal hell on earth. A truthful record of the sufferings, the starvation and the misery imposed by the Confederates upon our helpless comrades at that place, would cause a blush of shame to suffuse the cheek of a Comanche chief. Arrived on the Richmond side, we dragged our weary bodies from the cars, and forming into line, were marched down a street parallel with the river. I suppose it was the main business street of the city. Trade was going on just as though there was no war in progress.