otted to each for all the purposes of living!

Overrun with vermin, perishing with cold, breathing a stifled, tainted
atmosphere, no space allowed them for rest by day, and lying down at
night "wormed and dovetailed together like fish in a basket,"--their
daily rations only two ounces of stale beef and a small lump of hard
corn-bread, and their lives the forfeit, if they caught but one streak
of God's blue sky through those filthy windows,--they have endured there
all the horrors of the middle-passage. My soul sickened as I looked on
the scene of their wretchedness. If the liberty we are fighting for were
not worth even so terrible a price,--if it were not cheaply purchased
even with the blood and agony of the many brave and true souls who have
gone into that foul den only to die, or to come out the shadows of
men,--living ghosts, condemned to walk the night and to fade away before
the breaking of the great day that is coming,--who would not cry out
for peace, for peace on any terms?

And while these thoughts were in my mind, the cringing, foul-mouthed,
brutal, contemptible ruffian who had caused all this misery stood within
two paces of me! I could have reached out my hand, and, with half an
effort, have crushed him, and--I did not do it! Some invisible Power
held my arm, for murder was in my heart.

"This is where that Yankee devil Streight, that raised hell so among you
down in Georgia, got out," said Turner, pausing before a jut in the wall
of the room. "A flue was here, you see, but we've bricked it up. They
took up the hearth, let themselves down into the basement, and then dug
through the wall, and eighty feet underground into the yard of a
deserted building over the way. If you'd like to see the place, step
down with me."

"We would, Major. We'd be right glad ter," I replied, adopting, at a
hint from the Judge, the Georgia dialect.

We descended a rough plank stairway, and entered the basement. It was a
damp, mouldy, dismal place, and even then--in hot July weather--as cold
as an ice-house. What must it have been in midwinter!

The keeper led us along the wall to where Streight and his party had
broken out, and then said,--

"It's three feet thick, but they went through it, and all the way under
the street, with only a few case-knives and a dust-pan."

"Wal, they _war_ smart. But, keeper, whar' wus yer eyes all o' thet
time? Down our way, ef a man couldn't see twenty Yankees a-wuckin' so
fur six weeks,