arrived at Danville at noon October 20th.

The town at this time contained four, formerly six, military prisons,
each a tobacco house about eighty to a hundred feet long by forty to
fifty wide, three stories high, built of brick, low between joints. The
officers were put into the building known as prison number three. We
were informed by the guards that it had formerly contained about two
hundred negro prisoners; but that some had died, others had been
delivered to their masters or set at work on fortifications, and the
number remaining just before our arrival was only sixty-four. These were
removed to make room for us.

Except about twenty large stout wooden boxes called spittoons, there was
no furniture whatever in prison number three. Conjecture was rife as to
the purpose of the Confederates in supplying us with spittoons and
nothing else. They were too short for coffins, too large for wash bowls,
too shallow for bathing tubs, too deep for tureens! To me much
meditating on final causes, a vague suspicion at length arose that there
was some mysterious relation between those twenty oblong boxes and a
score of hogsheads of plug tobacco, said to be stored in the basement. A
_tertium_ QUID, a solution of the tobacco, might afford a solution of
the spittoon mystery!

A dozen water buckets were put into each of the two upper rooms to which
all the officers were restricted; also a small cylinder coal stove;
nothing else until December, when another small stove was placed there.
Winter came early and unusually cold. The river Dan froze thick. It was
some weeks before we prevailed upon the prison commandant to replace
with wood the broken-out glass in the upper rooms. The first floor was
uninhabitable.

So with no bed nor blanket; no chairs, benches, nor tables; no
table-ware nor cooking utensils; not even shovel, poker, or coal-scoop;
most of us were in a sorry plight. The little stoves, heated white-hot,
would have been entirely inadequate to warm those rooms; but the coal
was miserably deficient in quality as well as quantity. The fire often
went out. To rekindle it, there was no other way than to upset the
whole, emptying ashes and cinders on the floor. At best, the heat was
obstructed by a compact ring of shivering officers, who had preempted
positions nearest the stoves. They had taken upon themselves to "run"
the thing; and they did it well. We called them "The Stove Brigade." In
spite of their efforts, they like th