cribed. Some of them had lots of bullet holes in them. But I saw
a beautiful, nice looking silver bugle hanging off to one side a little.
'I Thinks,' says I, 'I'll just take that little toot horn in out of the
wet, and take it back to camp.' I was just reaching up after it when I
heard some one say,

"'Halt!' and I'll be dog-Boned if there wasn't two of the meanest looking
Rebels, standing not ten feet from me, with their guns cocked and pointed
at me, and, of course, I knew I was a goner; they walked me back about
one hundred and fifty yards, where their picket line was. From there I
was kept going for an hour or two until we got over to a place on the
railroad called East Point. There I got in with a big crowd of our
prisoners, who were taken the day before, and we have been fooling along
in a lot of old cattle cars getting down here ever since.

"So this is 'Andersonville,' is it! Well, by ---!"

CHAPTER XLI.

CLOTHING: ITS RAPID DETERIORATION, AND DEVICES TO REPLENISH IT--DESPERATE
EFFORTS TO COVER NAKEDNESS--"LITTLE RED CAP" AND HIS LETTER.

Clothing had now become an object of real solicitude to us older
prisoners. The veterans of our crowd--the surviving remnant of those
captured at Gettysburg--had been prisoners over a year. The next in
seniority--the Chickamauga boys--had been in ten months. The Mine Run
fellows were eight months old, and my battalion had had seven months'
incarceration. None of us were models of well-dressed gentlemen when
captured. Our garments told the whole story of the hard campaigning we
had undergone. Now, with months of the wear and tear of prison life,
sleeping on the sand, working in tunnels, digging wells, etc., we were
tattered and torn to an extent that a second-class tramp would have
considered disgraceful.

This is no reflection upon the quality of the clothes furnished by the
Government. We simply reached the limit of the wear of textile fabrics.
I am particular to say this, because I want to contribute my little mite
towards doing justice to a badly abused part of our Army organization
--the Quartermaster's Department. It is fashionable to speak of "shoddy,"
and utter some stereotyped sneers about "brown paper shoes," and
"musketo-netting overcoats," when any discussion of the Quartermaster
service is the subject of conversation, but I have no hesitation in
asking the indorsement of my comrades to the statement that we have never
found anywhere else as d