called it “bull-grass,” but anything more unlike grass I never saw, so we rejected that nomenclature, and dubbed them “green fans.”  They were very hard to pull up, it being usually as much as the strongest of us could do to draw them out of the ground.  When pulled up there was found the smallest bit of a stock—­not as much as a joint of one’s little finger—­that was eatable.  It had no particular taste, and probably little nutriment, still it was fresh and green, and we strained our weak muscles and enfeebled sinews at every opportunity, endeavoring to pull up a “green fan.”

At one place where we stopped there was a makeshift of a garden, one of those sorry “truck patches,” which do poor duty about Southern cabins for the kitchen gardens of the Northern, farmers, and produce a few coarse cow peas, a scanty lot of collards (a coarse kind of cabbage, with a stalk about a yard long) and some onions to vary the usual side-meat and corn pone, diet of the Georgia “cracker.”  Scanning the patch’s ruins of vine and stalk, Andrews espied a handful of onions, which had; remained ungathered.  They tempted him as the apple did Eve.  Without stopping to communicate his intention to me, he sprang from the car, snatched the onions from their bed, pulled up, half a dozen collard stalks and was on his way back before the guard could make up his mind to fire upon him.  The swiftness of his motions saved his life, for had he been more deliberate the guard would have concluded he was trying to, escape, and shot him down.  As it was he was returning back before the guard could get his gun up.  The onions he had, secured were to us more delicious than wine upon the lees.  They seemed to find their way into every fiber of our bodies, and invigorate every organ.  The collard stalks he had snatched up, in the expectation of finding in them something resembling the nutritious “heart” that we remembered as children, seeking and, finding in the stalks of cabbage.  But we were disappointed.  The stalks were as dry and rotten as the bones of Southern, society.  Even hunger could find no meat in them.

After some days of this leisurely journeying toward the South, we halted permanently about eighty-six miles from Savannah.  There was no reason why we should stop there more than any place else where we had been or were likely to go.  It seemed as if the Rebels had simply tired of hauling us, and dumped us, off.  We had another lot of dead, accumulated since we left Savannah, and the scenes at that place were repeated.

The train returned for another load of prisoners.

CHAPTER LXV.

Blackshear and pierce country—­we take up new quarters, but are called out for exchange—­excitement over signing the parole—­A happy journey to Savannah—­grievous disappointment