The hash, which often made the breakfast, was composed of fragments of gristle and refuse left on the prisoners' plates after dinner, mixed with potatoes and rancid grease; this, and the soups and gravies, which had a similar origin, gave out a most nauseating smell. The men would gulp it down--it was that, or starve--trying to help it on its way with all the condiments they could lay hands on; but the effect of it, and of the food generally, upon the digestive tract was so disastrous in most cases that they might better have left it alone. I myself retired from the enterprise in my second or third week, and would have literally died of inanition had not the doctor, moved by I know not what suggestion (not mine), put me on the milk and oatmeal diet during the remainder of my sojourn. This applied for breakfast and supper; I sat at dinner, but satisfied myself with nibbling bread crusts, and witnessing the forlorn and perilous efforts of my friends to walk the line between starvation and acute indigestion. Not many were successful. For vegetables we had Irish and sweet potatoes, turnip tops (uneatable), black-eyed beans, bitter and greasy, and once a month, perhaps, a tomato. The butter was made of an inferior quality of lard, and cottonseed oil--a substance which entered into many other of our viands, and of which, with grease, it was calculated by an expert in the kitchen, we were offered as much as one pound per man every day. It produced a calamitous effect upon the digestive tract, inasmuch as there was hardly a white man in the prison who did not suffer chronically from stomach troubles--constant suffering, often becoming acute. The strongest digestions would resist for a while, but finally succumb. There was a poultry farm on the grounds, donated by outside benefactors specifically and exclusively for the benefit of prisoners, beginning with the tuberculous patients. After it got going, there may have been an average of six hundred fowls on the place. Of these, not one ever appeared on the prison tables. With the exception of a possible few that were stolen by prisoners having access to the yard, all were appropriated by higher officials, and the eggs as well. One official gave frequent dinner parties to his friends, and was said to use as many as five or six chickens a day, though I cannot vouch for that--it seems excessive. He certainly, sometimes, commandeered as many as fourteen or more at one time. There was a story of a great cake which he had made for some festival, into the composition of which entered one hundred and four eggs from our farm. To neither chickens nor eggs had he, of course, any title more legitimate than have you who read these lines. He had a large and hungry household, and many guests--among them, commonly, such government inspectors as were sent down from Washington, to see whether he and his fellow officials were honestly discharging their functions.