Our next move was to make the best of the situation.  We were divided into hundreds, each commanded by a Sergeant.  Ten hundreds constituted a division, the head of which was also a Sergeant.  I was elected by my comrades to the Sergeantcy of the Second Hundred of the First Division.  As soon as we were assigned to our ground, we began constructing shelter.  For the first and only time in my prison experience, we found a full supply of material for this purpose, and the use we made of it showed how infinitely better we would have fared if in each prison the Rebels had done even so slight a thing as to bring in a few logs from the surrounding woods and distribute them to us.  A hundred or so of these would probably have saved thousands of lives at Andersonville and Florence.

A large tree lay on the ground assigned to our hundred.  Andrews and I took possession of one side of the ten feet nearest the butt.  Other boys occupied the rest in a similar manner.  One of our boys had succeeded in smuggling an ax in with him, and we kept it in constant use day and night, each group borrowing it for an hour or so at a time.  It was as dull as a hoe, and we were very weak, so that it was slow work “niggering off”—­(as the boys termed it) a cut of the log.  It seemed as if beavers could have gnawed it off easier and more quickly.  We only cut an inch or so at a time, and then passed the ax to the next users.  Making little wedges with a dull knife, we drove them into the log with clubs, and split off long, thin strips, like the weatherboards of a house, and by the time we had split off our share of the log in this slow and laborious way, we had a fine lot of these strips.  We were lucky enough to find four forked sticks, of which we made the corners of our dwelling, and roofed it carefully with our strips, held in place by sods torn up from the edge of the creek bank.  The sides and ends were enclosed; we gathered enough pine tops to cover the ground to a depth of several inches; we banked up the outside, and ditched around it, and then had the most comfortable abode we had during our prison career.  It was truly a house builded with our own hands, for we had no tools whatever save the occasional use of the aforementioned dull axe and equally dull knife.

The rude little hut represented as much actual hard, manual labor as would be required to build a comfortable little cottage in the North, but we gladly performed it, as we would have done any other work to better our condition.

For a while wood was quite plentiful, and we had the luxury daily of warm fires, which the increasing coolness of the weather made important accessories to our comfort.

Other prisoners kept coming in.  Those we left behind at Savannah followed us, and the prison there was broken up.  Quite a number also came in from—­Andersonville, so that in a little while we had between six and seven thousand in the Stockade.  The last comers found all the material for tents and all the fuel used up, and consequently did not fare so well as the earlier arrivals.