Yet I am living witness of those years. I heard and saw much that I
shall not now revive, as where the victims of a pest lie buried it is
not wise to dig, lest the unseen be loosened once again. Yet something
it may be well to record of that time--the curtain lifted for a
glimpse, then dropped in silence--to teach our children that the men
who stood against their King stood with hope of no reward save liberty,
but faced the tempest that they had unchained with souls self-shriven
and each heart washed free of selfishness.

So if I speak of prisons where our thousands died--hind and gentleman
piled thick as shad in the fly market--sick and well and wounded all
together--it shall not be at length, only a scene or two that sticks in
memory.

Once, in the suffocating heat of mid-July, I saw a prison where every
narrow window was filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a
portion of the external air. And from that day, for many, many weeks
the dead-carts took the corpses to the outer ditches, passing steadily
from dawn to midnight.

All day, all night, they died around us in ship and prison, some from
suffocation, some from starvation, others delivered by prison fevers
which rotted them so slowly that I think even death shrank back
reluctant to touch them with his icy finger.

So piteous their plight, these crowded thousands, crushed in putrid
masses, clinging to the filthy prison bars, that they aroused
compassion in that strange and ancient guild that once had claimed the
Magdalen in its sad sisterhood, and these aided them with food, year
after year, until deliverance.

They had no other food, no water except from polluted drains, no fire
in winter, no barriers to the blackest cold that ever seared the city
from the times that man remembers. I say they had no other food and no
fire to cook the offal flung to them. That is not all true, because we
did our best, being permitted to furnish what we had--we and the
strange sisterhood--yet they were thousands upon thousands, and we were
few.

It is best that I say no more, for that proud England's sake from whose
loins we sprang--it is best that I speak not of Captain Cunningham the
Provost, nor of his deputy, O'Keefe, nor of Sproat and Loring. There
was butchers' work in my own North, and I shall not shrink from the
telling; there was massacre, and scalps taken from children too small
to lisp their prayers for mercy; that was devils' work, and may be
told. But