so, Andrews would pick u a couple of boards and slip away with them.  Then I would fall back in pretended (and some real) alarm, and—­Andrew would come up and draw his attention by a similar feint, while I made off with a couple more pieces.  After a few hours c this strategy, we found ourselves the possessors of some dozen planks, with which we made a lean-to, that formed a tolerable shelter for our heads and the upper portion of our bodies.  As the boards were not over five feet long, and the slope reduce the sheltered space to about four-and-one-half feet, it left the lower part of our naked feet and legs to project out-of-doors.  Andrews used to lament very touchingly the sunburning his toe-nails were receiving.  He knew that his complexion was being ruined for life, and all the Balm of a Thousand Flowers in the world would not restore his comely ankles to that condition of pristine loveliness which would admit of their introduction into good society again.  Another defect was that, like the fun in a practical joke, it was all on one side; there was not enough of it to go clear round.  It was very unpleasant, when a storm came up in a direction different from that we had calculated upon, to be compelled to get out in the midst of it, and build our house over to face the other way.

Still we had a tent, and were that much better off than three-fourths of our comrades who had no shelter at all.  We were owners of a brown stone front on Fifth Avenue compared to the other fellows.

Our tent erected, we began a general survey of our new abiding place.  The ground was a sandy common in the outskirts of Savannah.  The sand was covered with a light sod.  The Rebels, who knew nothing of our burrowing propensities, had neglected to make the plank forming the walls of the Prison project any distance below the surface of the ground, and had put up no Dead Line around the inside; so that it looked as if everything was arranged expressly to invite us to tunnel out.  We were not the boys to neglect such an invitation.  By night about three thousand had been received from Andersonville, and placed inside.  When morning came it looked as if a colony of gigantic rats had been at work.  There was a tunnel every ten or fifteen feet, and at least twelve hundred of us had gone out through them during the night.  I never understood why all in the pen did not follow our example, and leave the guards watching a forsaken Prison.  There was nothing to prevent it.  An hour’s industrious work with a half-canteen would take any one outside, or if a boy was too lazy to dig his own tunnel, he could have the use of one of the hundred others that had been dug.