We revenged ourselves as best we could by constructing fearfully wicked, obscene and insulting parodies on these, and by singing them with irritating effusiveness in the hearing of the guards who were inflicting these nuisances upon us.

Of the same nature was the garrison music.  One fife, played by an asthmatic old fellow whose breathings were nearly as audible as his notes, and one rheumatic drummer, constituted the entire band for the post.  The fifer actually knew but one tune “The Bonnie Blue Flag” —­and did not know that well.  But it was all that he had, and he played it with wearisome monotony for every camp call—­five or six times a day, and seven days in the week.  He called us up in the morning with it for a reveille; he sounded the “roll call” and “drill call,” breakfast, dinner and supper with it, and finally sent us to bed, with the same dreary wail that had rung in our ears all day.  I never hated any piece of music as I came to hate that threnody of treason.  It would have been such a relief if the, old asthmatic who played it could have been induced to learn another tune to play on Sundays, and give us one day of rest.  He did not, but desecrated the Lord’s Day by playing as vilely as on the rest of the week.  The Rebels were fully conscious of their musical deficiencies, and made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to induce the musicians among the prisoners to come outside and form a band.

CHAPTER XLV.

August—­needles stuck in pumpkin seeds—­some phenomena of starvation —­rioting in remembered luxuries.

“Illinoy,” said tall, gaunt Jack North, of the One Hundred and Fourteenth Illinois, to me, one day, as we sat contemplating our naked, and sadly attenuated underpinning; “what do our legs and feet most look most like?”

“Give it up, Jack,” said I.

“Why—­darning needles stuck in pumpkin seeds, of course.”  I never heard a better comparison for our wasted limbs.

The effects of the great bodily emaciation were sometimes very startling.  Boys of a fleshy habit would change so in a few weeks as to lose all resemblance to their former selves, and comrades who came into prison later would utterly fail to recognize them.  Most fat men, as most large men, died in a little while after entering, though there were exceptions.  One of these was a boy of my own company, named George Hillicks.  George had shot up within a few years to over six feet in hight, and then, as such boys occasionally do, had, after enlisting with us, taken on such a development of flesh that we nicknamed him the “Giant,” and he became a pretty good load for even the strongest horse.  George held his flesh through Belle Isle, and the earlier weeks in Andersonville, but June, July, and August “fetched him,” as the boys said.  He seemed to melt