The Confederate cooking needed to be supplemented. Here the cylinder coal-stoves were made useful. The tops of them were often covered with toasting corn bread. Tin pails and iron kettles of various capacities, from a pint to several quarts, suspended from the top by wooden hooks a foot or two in length, each vessel resting against the hot stove and containing rice, beans, Indian corn, dried apple, crust coffee, or other delicacy potable or edible slowly preparing, made the whole look like a big black chandelier with pendants. We were rather proud of our prison cuisine. Cooking was also performed on and in an old worn-out cook-stove, which a few of our millionaires, forming a joint-stock company for the purpose, had bought for two hundred Confederate dollars late in the season, and which the kind prison commander had permitted them to place near the southwest end of the upper room, running the pipe out of a window. Culinary operations were extensively carried on also in the open yard outside, about forty feet by twenty, at the northeast end of the building. Here the officer would build a diminutive fire of chips or splinters between bricks, and boil or toast or roast his allowance. We were grouped in messes of five to ten or twelve each. Happy the club of half a dozen that could get money enough and a big enough kettle to have their meal prepared jointly. Such was the case with my own group after the lapse of about two months. We had been pinched; but one morning Captain Cook came to me with radiant face and said: "Colonel, I have good news for you. _I_'m going to run this mess. My folks in New York have made arrangement with friends in England to supply me with money, and I've just received through the lines a hundred dollars. We'll live like fighting-cocks!" Adjt. J. A. Clark, 17th Pa. Cav., was our delighted cook. Shivering for an hour over the big kettle amid the ice and snow of the back yard, he would send up word, "Colonel, set the table for dinner." To "set the table" consisted in sweeping a space six or eight feet square, and depositing there the plates, wood, tin, or earthen (mine was of wood; it had cost me a week's labor in carving). The officers already mentioned, Cook, Clark, Bush, Sprague, with Lieut. E. H. Wilder, 9th N. Y. Cav., sit around in the elegant Turkish fashion, or more classical recline like the ancients in their symposia, each resting on his left elbow, with face as near as possible to the steaming kettle, that not a smell may be lost!