CHAPTER XVI.
LIBBY PRISON.
"All ye who enter here abandon hope." — Auld lang syne. — Major Turner. — Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. — Stoicism. — Glazier enters the prison-hospital. — A charnel-house. — Rebel surgeons. — Prison correspondence. — Specimen of a regulation letter. — The tailor's joke. — A Roland for an Oliver. — News of death. — Schemes for escape. — The freemasonry of misfortune. — Plot and counter-plot. — The pursuit of pleasure under difficulties.
It does not come within the scope of the present work to enter into a detailed description of the sufferings of the Union prisoners in this place of durance: those who have a taste for such gloomy themes may gratify it by reading the first work by our young soldier-author, entitled "The Capture, Prison-Pen and Escape," in which the horrors of that house of misery are eloquently described. We may, however, say this much, that if the testimony of eye-witnesses is to be credited, it was a fearful place, and one over whose portals the words of Dante might have been appropriately inscribed, "All ye who enter here abandon hope."
LIBBY PRISON.
Of some thousand Northern officers confined here, Glazier, of course, met several from his own corps, who had been previously captured. He at first felt his condition very acutely. His roving life amid the magnificent scenery of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania was now exchanged for the gloomy and monotonous routine of a prison; but he writes under date of October twenty-eighth, in a more reconciled and hopeful strain "I am gradually," he says, "becoming accustomed to this dungeon life, and I presume I shall fall into the habit of enjoying myself at times. 'How use doth breed a habit in a man.' Indeed he can accommodate himself to almost any clime or any circumstance of life, a gift of adaptation no other living thing possesses in any such degree." Of one man, in the midst of all his philosophy, our hero speaks very bitterly. We allude to Major Turner, military warden of the prison. He describes him as possessed of a vindictive, depraved, and fiendish nature, and moralizes over the man and his career in this wise:
"There is nothing more terrible than a human soul grown powerful in sin, and left to the horrible machinations of the evil one, and its own evil promptings. Demons developed from germs that might have produced seraphs, become rank growths, drinking in the healthful stimulants of life and reproducing them in hideous forms of vice and crime.
"'Souls made of fire, and children of the sun,
With whom revenge is virtue.'