The other
three were treated in the same manner.

The agony was simply excruciating. The boys were brave, and had resolved
to stand their punishment without a groan, but this was too much for
human endurance. Their will was strong, but Nature could not be denied,
and they shrieked aloud so pitifully that a young Reserve standing near
fainted. Each one screamed:

"For God's sake, kill me! kill me! Shoot me if--you want to, but let me
down from here!" The only effect of this upon Barrett was to light up
his brutal face with a leer of fiendish satisfaction. He said to the
guards with a gleeful wink:

"By God, I'll learn these Yanks to be more afeard of me than of the old
devil himself. They'll soon understand that I'm not the man to fool
with. I'm old pizen, I am, when I git started. Jest hear 'em squeal,
won't yer?"

Then walking from one prisoner to another, he said:

"D---n yer skins, ye'll dig tunnels, will ye? Ye'll try to git out, and
run through the country stealin' and carryin' off niggers, and makin'
more trouble than yer d----d necks are worth. I'll learn ye all about
that. If I ketch ye at this sort of work again, d----d ef I don't kill
ye ez soon ez I ketch ye."

And so on, ad infinitum. How long the boys were kept up there undergoing
this torture can not be said. Perhaps it was an hour or more. To the
locker-on it seemed long hours, to the poor fellows themselves it was
ages. When they were let down at last, all fainted, and were carried
away to the hospital, where they were weeks in recovering from the
effects. Some of them were crippled for life.

When we came into the prison there were about eleven thousand there.
More uniformly wretched creatures I had never before seen. Up to the
time of our departure from Andersonville the constant influx of new
prisoners had prevented the misery and wasting away of life from becoming
fully realized. Though thousands were continually dying, thousands more
of healthy, clean, well-clothed men were as continually coming in from
the front, so that a large portion of those inside looked in fairly good
condition. Put now no new prisoners had come in for months; the money
which made such a show about the sutler shops of Andersonville had been
spent; and there was in every face the same look of ghastly emaciation,
the same shrunken muscles and feeble limbs, the same lack-luster eyes and
hopeless countenances.

One of the commonest of sights was to