nd the hundred-pound hail, and the sharp beak of the ram
for the untried monitor, are facts for theories; and without the proof
of these, none of the three have the positive value of a skillet that
has been tried. We have Drake's theory. Here are the facts.

No cooking-utensils were allowed the prisoner; no blankets were allowed
the prisoner; no shelter of any sort was allowed the prisoner; no tools
or materials to construct a shelter were allowed the prisoner; no means
of living as a civilized man were allowed the prisoner; no way of
helping himself as a savage was allowed the prisoner. The rations were
at all times insufficient, and frequently so foul that starvation itself
could not swallow them: consequence, stomach and body weakened by a
perpetual hunger, and in many cases utter inability to retain food, good
or bad. More than that, the sluggish water-course that served as their
reservoir crept across their pen foul and thick with the _debris_ of the
Rebel camp above, and in the centre filtered through the spongy ground,
and creamed and mantled and spread out loathsomely into a hateful swamp;
and the fierce sun, beating down on its slimy surface, drew from its
festering pools and mounds of refuse a vapor of death, and the prisoners
breathed it; and the reek of unwashed and diseased bodies crowding close
on each other, and the sickening, pestilential odor of a huge camp
without sewerage or system of policing, made the air a horror, and the
prisoners breathed it.

Drake woke, stifling with the heat and horrible steam, and turning and
throwing out his arm, only yet half awake, struck on something cold and
stiff: the corpse of some poor fellow who had died there in the night
beside him. Drake, in a two years' campaign, had grown familiar with
death, but could not yet receive him as a bed-fellow, and scrambled up
in sickening horror to a day in which there was no breakfast to eat, no
arms to clean, no shoes to black, no dress to change, no work of any
sort to do, no letters to write or hope for, no books to read, no dinner
to prepare, at least till four P.M., when they served out
rations,--nothing to fix the eye, or offer subject of thought, but the
general and utter wretchedness. Nor could Drake and his fellows take
refuge in that unconscious self-gratulation with which we see the
miseries of our neighbors; for the future here threw shadows backward.
That skeleton, (I use the word not in the exaggerated sense in which