air complexion, sandy
hair, blue eyes, of slightly stooping figure; on the whole rather
good-looking. He was slow of speech, with a nasal twang that reminded me
of Dr. Horace Bushnell. His face always wore a sad expression. He had
been a student at Yale in the forties a few years before me. Once a
prisoner himself in our hands and fairly treated, he sympathized with
us. He had been wounded, shot through the right shoulder. When I visited
on parole the other Danville prisons in February, a Yankee soldier was
pointed out to me as wearing Colonel Smith's blood-stained coat, and
another was said to be wearing his vest. I had repeated interviews with
him, in which he expressed regret at not being able to make us more
comfortable. He said more than once to me, "I have no heart for this
business. It requires a man without any heart to keep a military prison.
I have several times asked to be relieved and sent to the front." An
officer of forceful executive ability might have procured for us lumber
for benches, more coal or wood for the stoves, some straw or hay for
bedding, blankets or cast-off clothing for the half naked; possibly a
little food, certainly a supply of reading matter from the charitably
disposed. Single instances of his compassion I have mentioned. I shall
have occasion to speak of another. But the spectacle of the hopeless
mass of misery in the four Danville prisons seemed to render him
powerless, if not indifferent. As Mrs. Browning puts it:

A red-haired child,
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping; but a million sick!
You could as soon weep for the rule of three,
Or compound fractions!

Like too many officers both Union and Confederate, he was often in
liquor; liquor was always in him. This "knight of the rueful
countenance," of the sad heart, the mourning voice, the disabled right
arm, and the weakness for apple-jack!--his only hope was to have an
exchange of prisoners; but Lincoln and Stanton and Grant would not
consent to that. The last I heard of him was when a letter of his was
shown me by Lieutenant Washington, a Confederate, a distant relative of
the great George. In it Smith, who had been absent a week from Danville,
complained that he had had "no liquor for three days," and that he was
"painfully sober"!

"Necessity," says the old apothegm, "is the mother of invention." It was
surpr