we
are apt to apply it, but advisedly; and I mean a living human being,
whose skin is literally drawn over hideously projecting bones, and who,
having actually lost all rounding-out and filling of flesh, has grown
transparent, so that by holding an arm in the light you may see the
blood-vessels and the inner edges of the bones,)--this skeleton lying
there was, perhaps, what Drake should be two months hence; those men
quarrelling, hyena-like, for the "job" of burying their dead comrades,
that scarred old man moaning for a compass, because he had lost his way
and could not find the North, were not lower or more pitiful than Drake
might yet be: for stout heart and brave blood and quick brain have no
charm against famine, pestilence, and a steady pressure of misery in all
possible forms.

The majority of his comrades sank helplessly into this quaking bog. Out
of fifty captured of his regiment, Williams, a delicate lad, sickened at
once; Dean, a stout old Scotchman, was close on idiocy in a month;
Allan, the color-bearer, was shot by the guard,--he had slipped near the
dead line, and fallen with his head outside; fourteen were dead of
disease; twelve more sank in rayless, hopeless apathy; and Drake--was
busy on "A History of the Stockade Prison." The way in which he got the
idea and his stationery is worth telling.

There had fallen upon him a dread of motion,--a sombre endurance,--a
discouraged sense of thirty thousand hopeless men dragging him down to
despair,--a dark cloud that shut out God and home and help,--an
inability to compose and fix his drowsy, reeling thought, that spun off
dizzily to times at school, and love and laughter at home, and lapsed
itself in forgetfulness, and ceased to be even dreamy speculation.
Drake, in short, was going to the bottom with his theory about his neck,
when a "Providence,"--the modern way of dodging an acknowledgment to
God, whom, by the by, our poor boy had quite omitted in his little
theory of self-preservation,--in the curious shape of an official
blunder, stepped in to his rescue. A cook-house was in erection without
the limits of their pen, and, though no carpenter, Drake was set with
others to work under guard. The first glimpse of the open country,
stretching away to meet the low horizon, brought back the half-forgotten
thought of Freedom; and the very trail of her robe is so glorious, that
even this poor savage liberty of rock and clod roused in him anew wit to
devise and co