So with no bed nor blanket; no chairs, benches, nor tables; no table-ware nor cooking utensils; not even shovel, poker, or coal-scoop; most of us were in a sorry plight. The little stoves, heated white-hot, would have been entirely inadequate to warm those rooms; but the coal was miserably deficient in quality as well as quantity. The fire often went out. To rekindle it, there was no other way than to upset the whole, emptying ashes and cinders on the floor. At best, the heat was obstructed by a compact ring of shivering officers, who had preempted positions nearest the stoves. They had taken upon themselves to "run" the thing; and they did it well. We called them "The Stove Brigade." In spite of their efforts, they like the rest suffered from cold. Three or four of us, as a sanitary measure, made it a point to see, if possible, the funny, or at least the bright side of everything, turn melancholy to mirth, shadow to sunshine. When every officer complained of cold, we claimed to anticipate the philosophers, Tyndall, Huxley, and the other physicists, in declaring that "heat is a mode of _motion_," and brisk bodily exercise will infallibly demonstrate the fact! When, as was usually the case, all were hungry, we announced as a sure cure for indigestion, "stop _eating_!" When our prisoner chaplain Emerson on a Sunday afternoon prayed for the dear ones we expected to see no more, and even the roughest and most profane were in tears, we said with old Homer, "_Agathoi aridakrues andres_" ("Gallant men are easily moved to tears"), or with Bayard Taylor, "The bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring." Most humiliating of all was the inevitable plague of vermin. "Hard indeed," one officer was accustomed to say, "must have been Pharaoh's heart, and tougher yet his epidermis, if the lice of the third Egyptian plague were like those of Danville, and yet he would not 'let Israel go.'" Wearing the same clothing night and day, sitting on the bare floors, sleeping there in contact with companions not over-nice, no patient labor, no exterminating unguent, afforded much relief. We lost all squeamishness, all delicacy on the subject, all inclination for concealment. It was not a returned Danville prisoner who was reported to have gone into a drug store in New York stealthily scratching and saying, "I want some unguentum; don't want it for myself; only want it for a friend." But it was reported and believed that in April one of them entered an apothecary shop in Annapolis plying his finger-nails and hurriedly asking, "Have you any bmsquintum?"--"From your manner," answered the courteous druggist, "I think what you want is unguentum."--"Yes, _run git 'em_; I guess that _is_ the true name."--"Unguentum, sir"; said the shopkeeper. "How much unguentum do you want?"--"Well, I reckon about two pound!"--"My dear sir, two pounds would kill all the lice in Maryland."--"Well, I vow I believe I've got 'em!"