the remotest comprehension of what they had been fighting for, or how
they had deserved to be shut up in that dreary hole; nor, possibly, did
they care to inquire into this latter mystery, but took it as a godsend
to be suffered to lie here in a heap of unwashed human bodies, well
warmed and well foddered to-day, and without the necessity of bothering
themselves about the possible hunger and cold of to-morrow. Their dark
prison-life may have seemed to them the sunshine of all their lifetime.

There was one poor wretch, a wild-beast of a man, at whom I gazed with
greater interest than at his fellows; although I know not that each one
of them, in their semi-barbarous moral state, might not have been
capable of the same savage impulse that had made this particular
individual a horror to all beholders. At the close of some battle or
skirmish, a wounded Union soldier had crept on hands and knees to his
feet, and besought his assistance,--not dreaming that any creature in
human shape, in the Christian land where they had so recently been
brethren, could refuse it. But this man (this fiend, if you prefer to
call him so, though I would not advise it) flung a bitter curse at the
poor Northerner, and absolutely trampled the soul out of his body, as
he lay writhing beneath his feet. The fellow's face was horribly ugly;
but I am not quite sure that I should have noticed it, if I had not
known his story. He spoke not a word, and met nobody's eye, but kept
staring upward into the smoky vacancy towards the ceiling, where, it
might be, he beheld a continual portraiture of his victim's
horror-stricken agonies. I rather fancy, however, that his moral sense
was yet too torpid to trouble him with such remorseful visions, and
that, for his own part, he might have had very agreeable reminiscences
of the soldier's death, if other eyes had not been bent reproachfully
upon him and warned him that something was amiss. It was this reproach
in other men's eyes that made him look aside. He was a wild-beast, as I