Speaking of secret society pins recalls a noteworthy story which has been told me since the war, of boys whom I knew.  At the breaking out of hostilities there existed in Toledo a festive little secret society, such as lurking boys frequently organize, with no other object than fun and the usual adolescent love of mystery.  There were a dozen or so members in it who called themselves “The Royal Reubens,” and were headed by a bookbinder named Ned Hopkins.  Some one started a branch of the Order in Napoleon, O., and among the members was Charles E. Reynolds, of that town.  The badge of the society was a peculiarly shaped gold pin.  Reynolds and Hopkins never met, and had no acquaintance with each other.  When the war broke out, Hopkins enlisted in Battery H, First Ohio Artillery, and was sent to the Army of the Potomac, where he was captured, in the Fall of 1863, while scouting, in the neighborhood of Richmond.  Reynolds entered the Sixty-Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and was taken in the neighborhood of Jackson, Miss.,—­two thousand miles from the place of Hopkins’s capture.  At Andersonville Hopkins became one of the officers in charge of the Hospital.  One day a Rebel Sergeant, who called the roll in the Stockade, after studying Hopkins’s pin a minute, said: 

“I seed a Yank in the Stockade to-day a-wearing a pin egzackly like that ere.”

This aroused Hopkins’s interest, and he went inside in search of the other “feller.”  Having his squad and detachment there was little difficulty in finding him.  He recognized the pin, spoke to its wearer, gave him the “grand hailing sign” of the “Royal Reubens,” and it was duly responded to.  The upshot of the matter was that he took Reynolds out with him as clerk, and saved his life, as the latter was going down hill very rapidly.  Reynolds, in turn, secured the detail of a comrade of the Sixty-Eighth who was failing fast, and succeeded in saving his life—­all of which happy results were directly attributable to that insignificant boyish society, and its equally unimportant badge of membership.

Along in the last of August the Rebels learned that there were between two and three hundred Captains and Lieutenants in the Stockade, passing themselves off as enlisted men.  The motive of these officers was two-fold:  first, a chivalrous wish to share the fortunes and fate of their boys, and second, disinclination to gratify the Rebels by the knowledge of the rank of their captives.  The secret was so well kept that none of us suspected it until the fact was announced by the Rebels themselves.  They were taken out immediately, and sent to Macon, where the commissioned officers’ prison was.  It would not do to trust such possible leaders with us another day.

CHAPTER L.

Food—­the meagerness, inferior quality, and terrible sameness —­rebel testimony on the subject—­futility of successful explanation.