"I hope he is making a handsome man of me," said Turner, in a sycophantic way.
"No, he isn't. He's drawing you to the life,—as if he'd known you for half a century."
We had entered a room about forty feet wide and a hundred feet deep, with bare brick walls, a rough plank floor, and narrow, dingy windows, to whose sash only a few broken panes were clinging. A row of tin wash-basins, and a wooden trough which served as a bathing-tub, were at one end of it, and half a dozen cheap stools and hard-bottomed chairs were littered about the floor, but it had no other furniture. And this room, with five others of similar size and appointments, and two basements floored with earth and filled with débris, compose the famous Libby Prison, in which, for months together, thousands of the best and bravest men that ever went to battle have been allowed to rot and to starve.
At the date of our visit, not more than a hundred prisoners were in the Libby, its contents having recently been emptied into a worse sink in Georgia; but almost constantly since the war began, twelve and sometimes thirteen hundred of our officers have been hived within those half-dozen desolate rooms and filthy cellars, with a space of only ten feet by two allotted to each for all the purposes of living!
Overrun with vermin, perishing with cold, breathing a stifled, tainted atmosphere, no space allowed them for rest by day, and lying down at night "wormed and dovetailed together like fish in a basket,"—their daily rations only two ounces of stale beef and a small lump of hard corn-bread, and their lives the forfeit, if they caught but one streak of God's blue sky through those filthy windows,—they have endured there all the horrors of the middle-passage. My soul sickened as I looked on the scene of their wretchedness. If the liberty we are fighting for were not worth even so terrible a price,—if it were not cheaply purchased even with the blood and agony of the many brave and true souls who have gone into that foul den only to die, or to come out the shadows of men,—living ghosts, condemned to walk the night and to fade away before the breaking of the great day that is coming,—who would not cry out for peace, for peace on any terms?
And while these thoughts were in my mind, the cringing, foul-mouthed, brutal, contemptible ruffian who had caused all this misery stood within two paces of me! I could have reached out my hand, and, with half an effort, have crushed him, and—I did not do it! Some invisible Power held my arm, for murder was in my heart.
"This is where that Yankee devil Streight, that raised hell so among you down in Georgia, got out," said Turner, pausing before a jut in the wall of the room. "A flue was here, you see, but we've bricked it up. They took up the hearth, let themselves down into the basement, and then dug through the wall, and eighty feet underground into the yard of a deserted building over the way. If you'd like to see the place, step down with me."
"We would, Major. We'd be right glad ter," I replied, adopting, at a hint from the Judge, the Georgia dialect.
We descended a rough plank stairway, and entered the basement. It was a damp, mouldy, dismal place, and even then—in hot July weather—as cold as an ice-house. What must it have been in midwinter!
The keeper led us along the wall to where Streight and his party had broken out, and then said,—