flocked to see me, and I was kept busy telling my
story.

Having gone through it all, I was disposed to drop the hardships from
the story, except when questioned, and to treat the thing as a huge
picnic. My natural disposition being to see the bright side only, the
hardships of which I had to tell were made to have another aspect than
the usual one presented of prison life. As a consequence of this fact,
my story differed considerably from that of a number who had been
prisoners with me.

Friends would come to me and hear my story, frequently saying:

"My! Swiggett, you do not seem to have had such a bad time of it. The
others tell such horrible stories that it is a relief to hear yours; and
yet you were in the same prison. How is it?"

I replied in such cases that most of my time as a prisoner had been
spent outside of the stockade, in one way or another, and that, aside
from the monotony and the separation from family, we did not see much
more hardship than comes in the every-day life of lots of people out of
prison, and that there was a bright side to it all.

"But you don't damn the rebels, Swiggett, like the others," they would
say, to which I would reply that the rebels had treated me as well as
they could under the circumstances, and that when people did the best
they could they should not be damned for what they failed to do,
especially as prison life was necessarily a hardship at its best.

There were cases of personal ill-treatment which came under my notice,
but they were the great exceptions, and, as a rule, the rebels of my
acquaintance did for their prisoners all that was possible with the
means in their power, and treated them as well as prisoners could expect
to be treated.

It may be of interest to the reader to learn that all the men who were
my companions in escape are still living, except Capt. J. B. Gedney and
Adjt. Stephen K. Mahon.

The rebels did not treat us as well as we might have been treated, as it
was possible for Jeff Davis to have invited us to Richmond, arrayed us
in his Sunday clothes, fed us at his own table and confined us in his
front parlor. It may have been only an oversight that he did not do so,
but it was not expected, and we harbored no ill-feelings because of the
neglect. On the other hand, we were not treated as badly as we might
have been, inasmuch as we were not deprived of companionship, and, as a
rule, were allowed to sleep when we pleased, to rest as much as we