About the middle of the night a man belonging to a New Jersey regiment, who had apparently forgotten the order, stood up, and was immediately shot dead by the guard.
For four or five days more the decrepit little locomotive strained along, dragging after it the rattling' old cars.

The scenery was intensely monotonous.

It was a flat, almost unending, stretch of pine barrens and the land so poor that a disgusted Illinoisan, used to the fertility of the great American Bottom, said rather strongly, that, "By George, they'd have to manure this ground before they could even make brick out of it." It was a surprise to all of us who had heard so much of the wealth of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to find the soil a sterile sand bank, interspersed with swamps.
We had still no idea of where we were going.

We only knew that our general course was southward, and that we had passed through the Carolinas, and were in Georgia.

We furbished up our school knowledge of geography and endeavored to recall something of the location of Raleigh, Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta, through which we passed, but the attempt was not a success.
Late on the afternoon of the 25th of February the Seventh Indiana Sergeant approached me with the inquiry: "Do you know where Macon is ?" The place had not then become as well known as it was afterward.
It seemed to me that I had read something of Macon in Revolutionary history, and that it was a fort on the sea coast.