of a vindictive, depraved, and fiendish
nature, and moralizes over the man and his career in this wise:

"There is nothing more terrible than a human soul grown powerful in sin,
and left to the horrible machinations of the evil one, and its own evil
promptings. Demons developed from germs that might have produced
seraphs, become rank growths, drinking in the healthful stimulants of
life and reproducing them in hideous forms of vice and crime.

"'Souls made of fire, and children of the sun,
With whom revenge is virtue.'

"Thus we see a soul coming pure and plastic from its Maker's hand, yet
afterward standing before the world, stained and hardened."

Slowly and wearily the days and weeks passed on in "Libby," leaving its
drear monotony unbroken, except when the rumor of a prospect of being
exchanged came to flush the faces of the captives with a hope destined
not to be fulfilled while Willard Glazier was in Richmond. The result
was that he at length abandoned all hope of being exchanged, and for a
time tried hard to cultivate and "grow into the luxury of indifference."
His experience told him that "however reprehensible" it might be in
ordinary life, "stoicism, under the circumstances in which he then found
himself, was an actual necessity." His mind appears at this time to have
sustained him under many extreme bodily privations. But despite all his
philosophy and cultivated resignation of spirit, despite the mental
resources which he fortunately possessed in no small degree, and which
enabled him to occupy his time profitably, while others were pacing up
and down the room like caged beasts, feeding upon their own hearts, his
bodily health was materially impaired. The first winter month, with its
frosty atmosphere, and fierce northern blasts, instead of bringing
invigoration to his wasted frame, left him more debilitated; and upon
the eighth of December he succumbed to a disease which had been
encroaching upon him for some time, and requested to be sent to the
hospital. His sensations were far from pleasant when, for the first time
in his life, he found himself seriously ill among enemies, and in that
most dismal of all dismal places, a Prison Infirmary. "Once in the
hospital," he writes, "I found myself soon subjected to its peculiar
influences. There was the ominous stillness, broken only by the choking
cough, or labored groan; the chilling dread, as though one were in the
immediate presence of death, and un