f this imaginary
friend was J. H. Holland, a private soldier of the 30th Virginia
Cavalry. Ficklin forged a letter purporting to come from Holland to him,
which he showed to Colonel Smith, in which he spoke with much gratitude
of my friends' bounty, and besought Ficklin to look tenderly after my
comfort in return! The ruse succeeded. Ficklin's generosity to me was
repeated from time to time, and perhaps saved my life.

A year after the close of the war Ficklin wrote to me that he wished to
secure a position in the Treasury Department of the United States, and
he thought it would aid him if I would certify to what I knew of his
kindness to Union prisoners. I accordingly drew up a strong detailed
statement of his timely and invaluable charities to us in our distress.
I accompanied it with vouchers for my credibility signed by Hon. N. D.
Sperry, General Wm. H. Russell, and President Theodore D. Woolsey, all
of New Haven, and Governor Wm. A. Buckingham of Norwich, Conn. These
documents I forwarded to Ficklin. I do not know the result.

From Sergeant Wilson F. Smith, chief clerk at Colonel Smith's
headquarters, a paroled prisoner, member of Co. F., 6th Pa. Cav., the
company of Captain Furness, son or brother of my Shakespearian friend,
Dr. Horace Howard Furness, and from Mr. Strickland, undertaker, who
furnished the coffins and buried the dead of the Danville prisons, both
of whom I talked with when I was on parole in February, '65, I obtained
statistics mutually corroborative of the number of deaths in the
Danville prisons. In November there were 130; in December, 140; from
January 1st to January 24th, 105. The negro soldiers suffered most.
There were sixty-four of them living in prison when we reached Danville,
October 20, '64. Fifty-seven of them were dead on the 12th of February,
'65, when I saw and talked with the seven survivors in Prison No. Six.
From one of the officers (I think it was Captain Stuart) paroled like
myself in February to distribute supplies of clothing sent by the United
States through the lines, and who performed that duty in Salisbury, and
from soldiers of my own regiment there imprisoned, I learned that in the
hundred days ending February 1st, out of eight or ten thousand
prisoners, more than thirty a day, more than three thousand in all, had
died! Of Colonel Hartshorne's splendid "Bucktail Regiment," the 190th
Pa., formerly commanded by my Yale classmate Colonel O'Neil who fell at
Antietam, there