The battle-flag was simply the red field. My examination of all this was
necessarily very brief. The guards felt that I was in Richmond for other
purposes than to study architecture, statuary and heraldry,
and besides they were in a hurry to be relieved of us and get their
breakfast, so my art-education was abbreviated sharply.

We did not excite much attention on the streets. Prisoners had by that
time become too common in Richmond to create any interest. Occasionally
passers by would fling opprobrious epithets at "the East Tennessee
traitors," but that was all.

The commandant of the prisons directed the Tennesseeans to be taken to
Castle Lightning--a prison used to confine the Rebel deserters, among
whom they also classed the East Tennesseeans, and sometimes the West
Virginians, Kentuckians, Marylanders and Missourians found fighting
against them. Such of our men as deserted to them were also lodged
there, as the Rebels, very properly, did not place a high estimate upon
this class of recruits to their army, and, as we shall see farther along,
violated all obligations of good faith with them, by putting them among
the regular prisoners of war, so as to exchange them for their own men.

Back we were all marched to a street which ran parallel to the river and
canal, and but one square away from them. It was lined on both sides by
plain brick warehouses and tobacco factories, four and five stories high,
which were now used by the Rebel Government as prisons and military
storehouses.

The first we passed was Castle Thunder, of bloody repute. This occupied
the same place in Confederate history, that, the dungeons beneath the