October 19 — To-day we were marched from our quarters into a little hillside cross street in Harper’s Ferry, to the Provost Marshal’s office, where we went through the ordeal of a thorough search from cellar to garret, including knapsacks, haversacks, pockets, boots and shoes, hats and caps. Just to show how scrutinizingly the search was conducted, one man had a ten-cent United States greenback hidden in the toe of his sock and Mr. Yank found it.
The searching bee was held in a small room, and when I went through the shuffling process I saw about forty pocket-knives lying in a small tub, all of which had been extracted from the pockets of my countrymen that preceded me; and such an assortment of bygone cutlery I never saw before in one tub. The knives were in all stages of destruction and decay, and looked like a lot of ancient specimens from some old hunter’s relic case. If the cutlery that was found in these fellows’ pockets to-day bespeaks the condition of the Southern Confederacy, then Jeff Davis might as well take down his shingle now and go out of business before the cold weather sets in. However, I saw a few Yankee aides or clerks step up to the tub and select some of the best knives and put them in their pockets, without money and without price. While we were packed in the little side street waiting for the searching operation, a lady stood on an upper porch near by and threw some apples down into the densely packed crowd. I never saw such pushing and scrambling before, and I came very near being squeezed into a speck, and then got no apple. What are a few apples in a bunch of a hundred famished men, anyhow; but blessed are they who feed the hungry. After we were all searched we were marched to Sandy Hook, the first station below Harper’s Ferry on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on the Maryland side of the Potomac. This evening at dark we were put on a train for shipment to Baltimore.
