rison authorities
furnish none. His rations--a day's rations, remember--were eight ounces
of Indian meal, cob and kernel ground together, (as with us for pigs,)
and sour, (a common occurrence,) and two ounces of condemned pork (not
to appear again in our pages, as it proved too strong even for poor
Drake's hunger). He brought water in the cup from a ditch that traversed
the inclosure, and filtered it through a bit of cloth torn from his
shirt; and the meal being mixed with this water, (salt was not even
hinted at, the market price of that article being four dollars a pound
at Andersonville,) it was placed on a strip of wood before the fire, to
bake up to the half-raw point, that being the highest perfection
attainable in Drake's kitchen: for a range and a steady heat find the
baking of meal, so mixed, no easy matter. Eight ounces of meal make a
cake six inches long, five broad, and half an inch thick: that is to
say, Drake's dinner and supper for that day, and his breakfast and
dinner for the next day, were in the mass six inches long, five inches
broad, and half an inch thick. Give the figures an Indian-meal
consistency, you who are not of that order of Stoics that endures its
neighbor's sufferings without a groan. Try the experiment in your own
kitchen. One baking will carry conviction farther than batches of
statistics. Drake being famished chose to take four meals in
one,--improvident man! That done, he went to bed: quite an elaborate
arrangement, as practised among us, what with taking off of clothes, and
possibly washing and combing, and pulling up of sheets and coverlets,
and fitting of pillows to neck and shoulders; but nothing can be more
simple than the way they do it there. You just lie down wherever you
are,--and sleep, if you can. Drake could and did sleep most soundly.

This was our hero's first taste of prison-life. But a little reading and
much talk about camp-fires and behind earth-works--when there was a lull
in the storm of shot and shell--had etched out for him certain crude
theories, for which he was as ready to do battle as any other hot-headed
lad of twenty-three. "Starvation is the masked battery that plays the
Deuse with us all," he insisted; "and we must take that, or be taken
out--feet foremost. As for your '_how_,' good Incredulity and Unbelief,
where there is an end, and the will to reach it, the means are tolerably
sure to be lying around loose somewhere." But examinations for
candidates, a