CHAPTER XLV.
AUGUST--NEEDLES STUCK IN PUMPKIN SEEDS--SOME PHENOMENA OF STARVATION -- RIOTING IN REMEMBERED LUXURIES.
"Illinoy," said tall, gaunt Jack North, of the One Hundred and Fourteenth Illinois, to me, one day, as we sat contemplating our naked, and sadly attenuated underpinning; "what do our legs and feet most look most like ?" "Give it up, Jack," said I.
"Why--darning needles stuck in pumpkin seeds, of course." I never heard a better comparison for our wasted limbs.
The effects of the great bodily emaciation were sometimes very startling.
Boys of a fleshy habit would change so in a few weeks as to lose all resemblance to their former selves, and comrades who came into prison later would utterly fail to recognize them.

Most fat men, as most large men, died in a little while after entering, though there were exceptions.
One of these was a boy of my own company, named George Hillicks.

George had shot up within a few years to over six feet in hight, and then, as such boys occasionally do, had, after enlisting with us, taken on such a development of flesh that we nicknamed him the "Giant," and he became a pretty good load for even the strongest horse.

George held his flesh through Belle Isle, and the earlier weeks in Andersonville, but June, July, and August "fetched him," as the boys said.

He seemed to melt away like an icicle on a Spring day, and he grew so thin that his hight seemed preternatural.