Amid all this terrible misery and suffering, there were a few who kept their faith in God, and did not curse the authors of their misery. Conspicuous among these was a band of Union Tennesseans who were quartered near me. They held their prayer meetings regularly, and occasionally one of their number would deliver an exhortation. The faith of those men was of the abiding kind. They were modern Pauls and Silases praying for their jailors. I too had a faith, but not of the same quality as theirs. My faith was in a climate where overcoats would not be needed, and that our tormentors would eventually find it. We had no intercourse with the guards, and could get no newspapers, hence all the news we got was from the “tenderfeet” when they arrived. But the news we did get after Sherman and Grant began the advance, was of a cheering kind, and we had strong hopes of the ultimate success of the Union cause. I cannot imagine what the result, so far as we were concerned, would have been, had Sherman and Grant failed in their great undertakings. Without any hope to cheer us, we must have all been sacrificed in the arms of the Moloch of despair. One day in August a squad of Union Tennessee Cavalry was brought in. We tried in vain to find out what Sherman was doing, and how large an army he had. They only knew that they had been captured while on picket duty, and that Sherman had a “powathful lahge ahmy.” Your ordinary Southerner of those days, had a profound and an abiding ignorance of numbers. They were to him what pork is to a Jew, an unclean thing. He had no use for them, and would at a venture accept ten thousand dollars, as a greater sum than a million, for the reason that it took more words to express the former, than the latter sum. In the winter of 1862, while Mitchell’s Division was camped at Bacon Creek, Ky., we had a picket post on a plantation owned by a man named Buckner, a cousin of the rebel General S. B. Buckner, he was, or professed to be, a Union man. He went down to Green River on one occasion to visit Buell’s army. On his return I asked him how many soldiers General Buell had? “I can’t just say,” he replied, “but theys a powahful lot of em.” “Yes but how many thousand?” said I. “Well I wont be right suah, but theys a heap moah than a right smart chance of em,” was as near an approach to numbers as I could induce him to express. Geography is on the same catalogue with Arithmetic. While marching from Shepardsville to Elizabethtown, in 1861 we camped for the night on Muldraugh’s Hill, near the spot where President Lincoln was born. After we had “broke ranks” I went with others to a farm house not far away to procure water. A middle aged man met us, and after granting us permission to get water from his well, he asked me, “what regiment is that?” I told him it was the 10th Wisconsin. “Westconstant, Westconstant, let me see is Westconstant in Michigan?” inquired he.