A distressingly small lot of wood must suffice a detachment of two hundred and seventy men for three days. Often the individual portion would not make a fire that would scald, much less cook, the scant portion of cornmeal, which was sometimes coarse and unbolted. It was said that more than ten thousand cases of bloody dysentery prevailed at one time; aggravated by irritation to stomach and intestines from the practically uncooked food. The awful unsanitary conditions which prevailed can be described, but respect for the sensibilities of the reader forbids. Suffice it to say that the need for fuel was urgent, that a number of the stronger captives would lay aside their tattered remnants of clothing, wade into the slimy muck of the swamp, and, sinking to their armpits, would pull up fragments of wood that had long been submerged. This was mostly pitch pine and when broken up would quickly burn. The work of exhuming fuel under such repulsive conditions was chiefly done at night. It was noticed that in the morning the partially remaining foot-prints and depression, from which the stick had been drawn, were filled with clear water. This fact was a mystery until after the spring was opened; then the conclusion was reached that the spring water followed a deep seam in the clay and oozed into the swamp some distance below the surface and rose up through the openings made by the wood-diggers. Therefore Providence Spring was not especially created to order. Like Topsy, it had "allus" been. The providential aspects of the case may be thus stated; the spring existed, but was unknown. It was located under the space between the dead-line and the stockade, through which digging for a well was not permitted; it therefore remained undiscovered. The out-of-plumb position of the stockade timbers had existed for a long time, but was not noticed by the officials until the time when prayer began to be offered for water. As the petitions of Esther and Mordecai, unknown to the King, in a manner unseen affected his action, so by analogy, the prayer of Sergeant Shepard and his colleagues influenced the state of mind of the quartermaster and of Commandant Wirtz and they were moved to the repairing of the stockade which had long been neglected. This decision led to the forming of a broad trench by digging away the ground to afford the needed watershed from the base of the stockade. Thus a channel was formed which gathered the storm-water with force sufficient to tear away the ground over the spring and release the life-giving fountain. The slaves removed quite a depth of the earth directly over the unknown reservoir; thus the deepest part of the trench was brought so near the spring that the rush of the storm-flow could do the rest.