During the month of December a number of the prisoners in No. 3 attempted a jail delivery by crawling out through the drain of the water-closet. They were detected however and most of them captured and returned to prison. Among those who got away was John Squires, of Co. K., 10th Wis. He had part of a rebel uniform and managed to keep clear of the Home guards for a number of days, but was finally captured and returned to prison. But this did not discourage him. He had finished out his uniform while at large and was ready to try it again at the first opportunity. But Johnny was no Micawber who waited for something to turn up; he made his own opportunities. One day he took his knife and unscrewed the “catch” of the door lock and walked out, as he passed through the door he turned to his fellow prisoners and remarked “Now look he’ah yo’ Yanks, if yo’ don’t have this flo’ah cleaned when I git back yo’ll git no ration to-day.” Then turning he saluted the guard, walked down stairs, saluted the outer guard, walked across the square, over the bridge, passing two guards, past where a number of rebel soldiers were working on a fort and on to “God’s Country” where he arrived after weeks of wandering and hunger and cold in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the valleys of West Virginia:—another case of “cheek.” One day a rebel Chaplain came into our prison and preached to us. He informed us with a great deal of circumlocution that he was Chaplain of a Virginia Regiment, that he was a Baptist minister, and that his name was Chaplain. He then proceeded to hurl at our devoted heads some of the choicest selections of fiery extracts, flavored with brimstone to be found in the Bible. In his concluding prayer he asked the Lord to forgive us for coming into the South to murder and burn and destroy and rob, at the same time intimating that he, himself, could not do it. I suppose he felt better after he had scorched us and we felt just as well. He would have had to preach to us a long time before he could have made us believe that there was a worse place than rebel prisons. One source of great discomfort, yea, torture, was body lice, “grey-backs,” in army parlance. They swarmed upon us, they penetrated into all the seams of our clothing. They went on exploring expeditions on all parts of our bodies, they sapped the juices from our flesh, they made our days, days of woe, and our nights, nights of bitterness and cursing. We could not get hot water, our unfailing remedy in the army. Our only resource was “skirmishing.” This means stripping our clothes and hunting them out:—and crushing them. On warm days it was a common sight to see half of the men in the room with their shirts off, skirmishing.