[3]At a point on the Cape Fear river, about ten miles from Wilmington, N. C., a trainload of old Andersonville prisoners who had been confined also at Florence, S. C., and Salisbury, N. C., were delivered to General Terry. They had just been paroled at Goldsboro, and were received by him about the middle of March, 1865. His headquarters was at a point on the Cape Fear river and recently taken from the enemy. It was now held by the Third New Hampshire, Sixteenth New York heavy artillery, and by a division of colored troops. The freight cars halted in a pine forest about a mile from this position, which commanded a pontoon bridge. A squad of cavalry received the ex-prisoners, unfurling the Stars and Stripes in greeting. Many of the boys in blue wept, when they saw our plight. The released men tried to hurrah, but were too weak to raise much of a shout. Three ambulances were loaded with as many of the sick as could be taken on the first trip. At the farther end of the pontoon bridge the road led through a deep cut in the bank up to the open space of the camp where guns pointed over the river towards the forest through which the freight train had come from Goldsboro with the paroled men. Spanning this cut was an arch constructed of evergreen boughs and faced with the white cloth square of shelter tent, upon which was spelled in letters made of evergreen sprigs, "THE SIXTEENTH NEW YORK WELCOMES YOU HOME." The march of a mile from the railroad to the pontoon bridge greatly exhausted the paroled prisoners. At first the excitement of once more gazing upon the flag they loved, and being received by the advanced squadron, stimulated them to walk with some show of vigor. But soon their eyes shone with the unwonted brightness of fatigue in contrast with their pinched and grimy faces. Many sank by the wayside, to be picked up by the ambulance when the same could return for them. The stronger ones worked up into the head of the column which crossed the pontoon bridge and the advance files of men undertook to walk up through the cut in the bank at the bridge end. But their feet sank in the sand and they were too weak to go further. Meanwhile a company of colored soldiers were drawn up through the cut in two ranks facing. Between these lines and under the arch our ambulance passed; the horses tugging with might and main up the steep grade and through the deep sand. The white officers and the black soldiers stood at "Present Arms." The eyes of the soldiers opened and their teeth gleamed with an aspect of astonishment, as they for the first time beheld seasoned graduates from a course of experiences in war-prisons. The living wrecks in the ambulances were still more pale and ghastly than were the stronger ones following slowly on foot, and as the latter emerged from the woods on to the floating bridge, the onlooking crowd of our men off duty began to be stirred with a great excitement.