After spending two days among the mosquitoes of that region I at last secured transportation and started up the river to join my regiment. We had to be convoyed by a gunboat.
When I reached Duval's Bluffs my company was doing guard duty. I found all hands and had a great reception, learning all the home news. This was the first positive information of a recent date, about home matters, received by me since my capture.
After spending three or four days with the boys, I went home, and my wife and myself renewed our acquaintance.
She had heard of me through an escaped prisoner, who had reported me as being in the stockade, but she had received no other information concerning me until the boys had gotten home after the exchange. My letter from New Orleans had been a very welcome missive.
My friends at home flocked to see me, and I was kept busy telling my story.
Having gone through it all, I was disposed to drop the hardships from the story, except when questioned, and to treat the thing as a huge picnic. My natural disposition being to see the bright side only, the hardships of which I had to tell were made to have another aspect than the usual one presented of prison life. As a consequence of this fact, my story differed considerably from that of a number who had been prisoners with me.
Friends would come to me and hear my story, frequently saying:
"My! Swiggett, you do not seem to have had such a bad time of it. The others tell such horrible stories that it is a relief to hear yours; and yet you were in the same prison. How is it?"
I replied in such cases that most of my time as a prisoner had been spent outside of the stockade, in one way or another, and that, aside from the monotony and the separation from family, we did not see much more hardship than comes in the every-day life of lots of people out of prison, and that there was a bright side to it all.
"But you don't damn the rebels, Swiggett, like the others," they would say, to which I would reply that the rebels had treated me as well as they could under the circumstances, and that when people did the best they could they should not be damned for what they failed to do, especially as prison life was necessarily a hardship at its best.