When we arrived at Salisbury, which was one of the most notorious rebel slaughter houses of the South, a place that vied with Andersonville in atrocities, cruelties, starvation and death. A place where thirteen thousand Union soldiers, became victims to the vindictiveness of their captors--no not their captors but their jailors--for the soldier, whether federal or confederate, who had the courage to risk his life in the field where prisoners were captured, possessed too great a sense of honor to treat with such heartless cruelty, those who so gallantly opposed them. I say that when we arrived at Salisbury, we learned that there had been a desperate attempt made by the enlisted men confined there, to overpower the guard and make their escape that afternoon, and the artillery had opened on the prison pen with grape and cannister, killing, and wounding, many of the Union prisoners confined there. Great excitement still prevailed when we arrived, and threats of shooting the d--d Yanks were freely indulged in by the "new issue," as the home guard were called. But we were not molested; probably owing to the fact that we had a guard over us, of soldiers who were ready and willing to protect their prisoners from interference from outside parties. We staid in Salisbury until about eleven o'clock p. m., during which time the reb guard, and their lady friends, were parading around the depot where we were waiting for the train, singing, flirting, and talking about the Yankee prisoners. While we were sitting on the depot platform waiting, we were smoking, and as the platform was filled with bales of cotton, we were, while apparently uninterested spectators of what was going on, emptying our pipes into the cotton bales. We thus managed to set fire to a number of these bales of cotton, well knowing that after we were gone and the guard had retired, there would be apt to be a blaze; and the next day we heard that the depot at Salisbury was burned the night before, destroying a large amount of cotton stored there. On my arrival at Danville, I met Colonel W. C. Raulston, of the 24th New York Cavalry, with whom I was acquainted, and who introduced me to the members of his mess, Brigadier-General A. N. Duffie, Brigadier-General Hays, and Lieutenants Leydon and VanDerweed, who were all anxious to talk with me about the chances of escape. Knowing that I had had considerable experience in that line, they naturally concluded that I could give them some valuable points on how to escape, and how best to reach our lines after we had got out.