eaders know him, it will be highly amusing
to them, although any thing but amusing to the Major. He says: "In the
office of the penitentiary, I was stripped of my clothing and closely
searched. Everything in the way of papers, knife, money, toothpick, and
even an old buckeye, which I had carried in my pocket all through the
war, at the request of a friend, were taken from me. I was then marched
to the wash-room, stripped again, and placed in a tub of warm water,
about waist deep, where a convict scrubbed me with a large, rough, horse
brush and soap; while a hang-dog looking scoundrel, and the
deputy-warden Dean, urged the convict to 'scrub the d--d horse-thief,'
and indulged in various demoniacal grins and gesticulations of
exultation at my sufferings and embarrassment." The Major describes "his
feelings," in the strong language of which he never lacked command; but
it is unnecessary to quote from him farther--there is no man, so devoid
of imagination, that he can not divine what the patients' feeling must
have been under such treatment.

When two or three months had elapsed, General Morgan's impatience of the
galling confinement and perpetual espionage amounted almost to frenzy.
He restrained all exhibition of his feelings remarkably, but it was
apparent to his fellow prisoners that he was chafing terribly under the
restraint, more irksome to him than to any one of the others.

The difficulty of getting letters from our families and friends in the
South, was one of the worst evils of this imprisonment; and if a letter
came containing anything in the least objectionable, it was, as likely
as not, destroyed, and the envelope only was delivered to the man to
whom it was written. Generally, the portion of its contents, which
incurred Merion's censure, having been erased, it was graciously
delivered, but more than once a letter which would have been valued
beyond all price, was altogether withheld, and the prisoner anxiously
expecting it, was mocked, as I have stated, with being given the
envelope in which it came, as evidence that he was robbed of it. The
reader can imagine the feelings of a man, whose wife and children were
in far off "Dixie," while he lay in prison tortured with anxiety to hear
from them, and who, when the letter which told of them at last came,
should be deprived of it because it contained some womanly outburst of
feeling, and should be tantalized with the evidence of his loss.

The introduction of ne