He disbursed his sheets at twenty-five cents per copy, but they afterward went up to fifty.
A lieutenant in Grant's army, while charging one of the batteries in the rear of Vicksburg, received a shot in the face which entered one eye, destroying it altogether. Ten days after, he arrived in Libby. He walked about our room with a handkerchief tied around his head, smoking complacently, apparently considering a bullet in the brain a very slight annoyance.
We attempted to celebrate the Fourth of July. Captain Driscoll, of Cincinnati, with other ingenious officers, had manufactured from shirts a National flag, which was hung above the head of Colonel Streight, who occupied the chair, or rather the bed, which necessity substituted. Two or three speeches had been made, and several hours of oratory were expected, when a sergeant came up and said:—
"Captain Turner orders that you stop this furse!"
Observing the flag, he called upon several officers to assist him in taking it down. Of course, none did so. He finally reached it himself, tore it down, and bore it to the prison office. A long discussion ensued about obeying Turner's order. After nearly as much time had been consumed in debate as it would have required to carry out the programme, and speak to all the toasts—dry toasts—it was voted to comply. So the meeting, first adopting a number of intensely patriotic resolutions, incontinently adjourned.
The Horrors of Belle Isle.
The Rebel authorities confiscated large sums of money sent from home to the prisoners, and sometimes stopped the purchase of supplies, asserting that it was done in retaliation for similar treatment of their own soldiers confined in the North. Still our officers fared incomparably better than the Union privates who were half starved upon Belle Isle, in sight of our prison. We did not fully accredit the reports which reached us touching the sufferings of these prisoners, though the engravings of their emaciation and tortures in the New York illustrated papers, which sometimes drifted to us, so enraged the Rebels, that we often called their attention to them. But our own paroled officers, who were permitted to distribute among the privates clothing sent by our Government, assured us that they were substantially true.