The Open Air and Pure Water.
But the yard of four acres, like some old college grounds, with great oak trees and a well of sweet, pure water, was open to us during the whole day. There, the first time for nine months, our feet pressed the mother earth, and the blessed open air fanned our cheeks.
Mr. Luke Blackmer, of Salisbury, kindly placed his library of several thousand volumes at our disposal. Whenever we wished for books we had only to address a note to him, through the prison authorities, and, in a few hours, a little negro with a basket of them on his head would come in at the gate. It seemed more like life and less like the tomb than any prison we had inhabited before.
The Crushing Weight of Imprisonment.
And yet those long Summer months were very dreary to bear, for we had upon us the one heavy, crushing weight of captivity. It is not hunger or cold, sickness or death, which makes prison life so hard to bear. But it is the utter idleness, emptiness, aimlessness of such a life. It is being, through all the long hours of each day and night—for weeks, months, years, if one lives so long—absolutely without employment, mental or physical—with nothing to fill the vacant mind, which always becomes morbid and turns inward to prey upon itself.
What exile from his country Can flee himself as well?
It was doubtless this which gave us the look peculiar to the captive—the disturbed, half-wild expression of the eye, the contraction of the wrinkled brow which indicates trouble at the heart.
We were most struck with this in the morning, when, on first going out of our sleeping quarters, we passed down by the hospital and stopped beside the bench where those were laid who had died during the night. As we lifted the cloth, to see who had found release, the one thing which always impressed me was the perfect calm, the sweet, ineffable peace, which those white, thin faces wore. For months I never saw it without a twinge of envy. Until then I never felt the meaning of the words, "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." Until then I never realized the wealth of the assurance, "He giveth his beloved sleep."
Bad News from Home.
Some prisoners had an additional weight to bear. They were southern Unionists—Tennesseans, North Carolinians, West Virginians, and Mississippians—whose families lived on the border. They knew that they were liable any day to have their houses robbed or burned by the enemy, and their wives and little ones turned out to the mercy of the elements, or the charity of friends. This gnawing anxiety took away their elasticity and power of endurance. They had far less capacity for resisting disease and hardship than the northeners, and died in the proportion of four or five to one. I could hardly wonder at the fervor with which, in their devotional exercises, night after night, they sung the only hymn which they ever attempted: