The night was chilly one we soon had a number of fires blazing.

Green pitch pine, when burned, gives off a peculiar, pungent odor, which is never forgotten by one who has once smelled it.

I first became acquainted with it on entering Andersonville, and to this day it is the most powerful remembrance I can have of the opening of that dreadful Iliad of woes.
On my journey to Washington of late years the locomotives are invariably fed with pitch pine as we near the Capital, and as the well-remembered smell reaches me, I grow sick at heart with the flood of saddening recollections indissolubly associated with it.
As our fires blazed up the clinging, penetrating fumes diffused themselves everywhere.

The night was as cool as the one when we arrived at Andersonville, the earth, meagerly sodded with sparse, hard, wiry grass, was the same; the same piney breezes blew in from the surrounding trees, the same dismal owls hooted at us; the same mournful whip-poor-will lamented, God knows what, in the gathering twilight.
What we both felt in the gloomy recesses of downcast hearts Andrews expressed as he turned to me with: "My God, Mc, this looks like Andersonville all over again." A cupful of corn meal was issued to each of us.

I hunted up some water.
Andrews made a stiff dough, and spread it about half an inch thick on the back of our chessboard.