When we were turned inside, and I realized that the gates of another prison had closed upon me, hope forsook me.  I flung our odious little possessions-our can, chess-board, overcoat, and blanket-upon the ground, and, sitting down beside them, gave way to the bitterest despair.  I wanted to die, O, so badly.  Never in all my life had I desired anything in the world so much as I did now to get out of it.  Had I had pistol, knife, rope, or poison, I would have ended my prison life then and there, and departed with the unceremoniousness of a French leave.  I remembered that I could get a quietus from a guard with very little trouble, but I would not give one of the bitterly hated Rebels the triumph of shooting me.  I longed to be another Samson, with the whole Southern Confederacy gathered in another Temple of Dagon, that I might pull down the supporting pillars, and die happy in slaying thousands of my enemies.

While I was thus sinking deeper and deeper in the Slough of Despond, the firing of a musket, and the shriek of the man who was struck, attracted my attention.  Looking towards the opposite end of the, pen I saw a guard bringing his still smoking musket to a “recover arms,” and, not fifteen feet from him, a prisoner lying on the ground in the agonies of death.  The latter had a pipe in his mouth when he was shot, and his teeth still clenched its stem.  His legs and arms were drawn up convulsively, and he was rocking backward and forward on his back.  The charge had struck him just above the hip-bone.

The Rebel officer in command of the guard was sitting on his horse inside the pen at the time, and rode forward to see what the matter was.  Lieutenant Davis, who had come with us from Andersonville, was also sitting on a horse inside the prison, and he called out in his usual harsh, disagreeable voice: 

“That’s all right, Cunnel; the man’s done just as I awdahed him to.”

I found that lying around inside were a number of bits of plank—­each about five feet long, which had been sawed off by the carpenters engaged in building the prison.  The ground being a bare common, was destitute of all shelter, and the pieces looked as if they would be quite useful in building a tent.  There may have been an order issued forbidding the prisoners to touch them, but if so, I had not heard it, and I imagine the first intimation to the prisoner just killed that the boards were not to be taken was the bullet which penetrated his vitals.  Twenty-five cents would be a liberal appraisement of the value of the lumber for which the boy lost his life.

Half an hour afterward we thought we saw all the guards march out of the front gate.  There was still another pile of these same kind of pieces of board lying at the further side of the prison.  The crowd around me noticed it, and we all made a rush for it.  In spite of my lame feet I outstripped the rest, and was just in the act of stooping down to pick the boards up when a loud yell from those