Ten months of prison life, during nearly all of which was continued a system of slow starvation, had so absorbed and dried up my stomach, that, although I still starved daily, the coarse corn bread, half-baked as it was, ever seemed to stick in the centre of my stomach, and cause me an incessant dull pain. This pain continued until I was finally released, and afterwards. After having survived all, and gotten home, I found my stomach so contracted, that, although I was always hungry after as well as before a meal, I could eat but very little, and that distressed me greatly. In fact, it seemed that I had saved my life at the expense of my stomach. To return to the prison. I suffered continuously, and was so weak that I spent a considerable portion of each day in a kind of trance-like condition--dreaming--my thoughts floating at will, within the limits of my mental horizon, with too little sail to be in danger of drifting very far out at sea; but I must say that in this state I passed the happiest hours of my prison life, my imagination being my greatest friend, and enabling my fancy more than once to set the prisoner free. After eating in the morning, before the heat became too intense, I would start on my trip for exercise, or to make some kind of a trade for a potato, if possible. Again in the evening, after eating, I would do the same. Naked creature that I was! All that summer my clothing consisted of a shirt and a pair of drawers! I must have had some kind of a hat. I speak of trading; to allow the reader to understand what is meant, I will explain. Although all prisoners were searched, some were fortunate enough to pass the ordeal of examination, retaining their valuables successfully concealed about them; these being traded to a guard for provisions, to wit: onions, potatoes, etc., brought the produce to the inside of the prison, and being inside was exposed for sale at a heavy profit by the lucky and enterprising Yankee. In this way several stands were started. Paroled men, going out to work during the day, on coming in at night, sometimes smuggled produce into camp, which was disposed of in the same way. But trade was never very extensive until the capture of the "Plymouth men;" then it reached its greatest proportions. The Plymouth men were so called because captured at Plymouth, N. C. They composed a brigade, and had just been paid their back-pay and veteran bounty, and were on the eve of going home on their veteran furlough, when, alas! they were unfortunately captured. These men had the easiest terms of capitulation of any prisoners taken in the late war.