drawn up tailor-fashion to keep them out of the mud.

With a shiver the girl hurried to the other gate.

Her eager eyes searched in vain among the ragged wretches who shambled
from the cars. A man from Baton Rouge, whom she failed to recognize,
lifted his faded hat and handed her a letter.

She read it through her tears and hurried to the Confederate White House
to show it to the President. Davis scanned the scrawl with indignant
sympathy:

"_Dear Little Sis_:

"This is the last message I shall ever send. Before it can reach you
I shall be dead--for which I'll thank God. I'm sorry now I didn't
take my chances with the other fellows, bribe the guard and escape
from Camp Douglas in Chicago. A lot of the boys did it. Somehow I
couldn't stoop. Maybe the fear of the degrading punishment they gave
McGoffin, the son of the Governor of Kentucky, when he failed,
influenced me, weak and despondent as I was. They hung him by the
thumbs to make him confess the name of his accomplices. He refused
to speak and they left him hanging until the balls of his thumbs
both burst open and he fainted.

"The last month at Camp Douglas was noted for scant rations. Hunger
was the prevailing epidemic. At one end of our barracks was the
kitchen, and by the door stood a barrel into which was thrown beef
bones and slops. I saw a starving boy fish out one of these bones
and begin to gnaw it. A guard discovered him. He snatched the bone
from the prisoner's hand, cocked his pistol, pressed it to his head
and ordered him to his all-fours and made him bark for the bone he
held above him--

"We expected better treatment when transferred to Elmira. But I've
lost hope. I'm too weak to ever pull up again. I've made friends
with a guard who has given me the list of the men who have died here
in the five months since we came. In the first four months out of
five thousand and twenty-seven men held here, one thousand three
hundred and eleven died--six and one-half per cent a month--"

Davis paused and shook his head--

"The highest rate we have ever known at Salisbury or Andersonville
during those spring months was three per cent!"

He finished the last line in quivering tones.

"There's not a chance on earth that I'll live to see you again. See
the President and beg him for God's sake to save as many of the boys
as he can. With a he