About the 1st of February the range of side rooms in which we were confined was wanted for hospital purposes. The prison hospital had been located in the garret above, but disease increased to such an extent that its accommodations were no longer sufficient. These chill and comfortless rooms had but little adaptation to their new purpose, and hastened the release of many a poor unfortunate by the mercy of death. Disease was now making fearful havoc. The hardships of prison-life and the starvation diet prepared the way for every contagion. Smallpox broke out, and prevailed to such an extent that the whole town was alarmed. The prisoners were vaccinated by the wholesale, but this necessary precaution caused great additional suffering. Men died in every room, and the visiting physician came each morning to remove to the hospitals those who showed marks of the dreaded pestilence. It would scarcely be believed that some prisoners actually counterfeited smallpox in order to be sent to the smallpox hospital, where they would have a better opportunity for escape. But escaping had become a regular mania, and all possible means were employed to effect it. No one of our party of six took the pestilence, though two suffered very severely from the vaccine virus. But the prevalence of disease did us a good service in securing our removal from the narrow stall to the comparative freedom of the room outside. This was a great change, and did seem like freedom by contrast. From this time the isolation of our prison-life was at an end. I have spoken of the "room," but the term is scarcely accurate. The partitions had been taken out or never inserted in this upper floor, and the prisoners could go from one end of the building to the other, but with guards stationed at every door and watching every window outside. In a far corner there was a stove,--the first fire we had felt since leaving Libby two months before. It did not suffice to warm half the people around it, and these were very quarrelsome, but it was a great luxury to be occasionally warm. The amusements of the hundreds who had been gathered into this receptacle of humanity were very _striking_, if not elegant. When a dense crowd had gathered around the stove, some person outside--usually one of a large group of very mischievous Irish-men--would cry, "Char-rge, me boys!" and a solid column of perhaps fifty men would rush against the group around the stove, knocking men in all directions, endangering limbs, and raising a perfect storm of profanity. Fights were very frequent, and it only needed the addition of intoxicating liquor to make the place a perfect pandemonium. As it was, the interference of the guard was often required to preserve order. Our party, however, always stood together, and were thus able to protect themselves.