he army a subaltern officer, rose, before the Battle of Perryville, to
the command of a regiment. At that battle a Rebel bullet entered his
shoulder, and crushed the bones of his right elbow. This disabled him
for field duty, and so it came about that he assumed the light blue of
the veterans, and on the second day of May, 1864, succeeded General Orme
in command of the military post at Chicago.

When fairly settled in the low-roofed shanty which stands, a sort of
mute sentry, over the front gateway of Camp Douglas, the new Commandant,
as was natural, looked about him. He found the camp--about sixty acres
of flat, sandy soil, inclosed by a tight board fence, an inch thick, and
fourteen feet high--had a garrison of but two regiments of veteran
reserves, numbering, all told, only seven hundred men fit for duty. This
small force was guarding eight thousand Rebel prisoners, one third of
whom were Texas rangers, and guerrillas who had served under
Morgan,--wild, reckless characters, fonder of a fight than of a dinner,
and ready for any enterprise, however desperate, that held out the
smallest prospect of freedom. To add to the seeming insecurity, nearly
every office in the camp was filled with these prisoners. They served
out rations and distributed clothing to their comrades, dealt out
ammunition to the guards, and even kept the records in the quarters of
the Commandant. In fact, the prison was in charge of the prisoners, not
the prisoners in charge of the prison. This state of things underwent a
sudden change. With the exception of a very few, whose characters
recommended them to peculiar confidence, all were at once placed where
they belonged,--on the inner side of the prison-fence.

A post-office was connected with the camp, and this next received the
Commandant's attention. Everything about it appeared to be regular. A
vast number of letters came and went, but they all passed unsealed, and
seemed to contain nothing contraband. Many of them, however, were short
epistles on long pieces of paper, a curious circumstance among
correspondents with whom stationery was scarce and greenbacks were not
over-plenty. One sultry day in June, the Commandant builded a fire, and
gave these letters a warming; and lo! presto! the white spaces broke out
into dark lines breathing thoughts blacker than the fluid that wrote
them. Corporal Snooks whispered to his wife, away down in Texas, "The
forthe of July is comin', Sukey, so be a man; fur I