The heat was so great that the perspiration broke from me in streams. The foeted air made me for a time deadly sick, and I wondered whether it could be possible they would leave human beings in this horrible place to perish. The thought of the black hole at Calcutta, where so many Englishmen died, rushed over me. True, this was done by the cruel and savage East Indians, while we were in the hands of "our Southern brethern," the "chivalry;" but I could not perceive that this difference of captors made any difference of treatment. My breath came thick and heavy, and I thought of suffocation. The ladder was drawn up, and with a dull and heavy sound that seemed crushing down on my heart, the trap-door fell. I wedged and jammed my way through the living throng to the window. The one I reached was just under the wooden stairs, and, of course, gave no light. The other was below the surface of the ground. They were at opposite sides of the room, and were only about a foot square, being filled with a triple row of thick set iron bars, that almost excluded every current of air. I pressed my face close to the bars, and breathed the purest air I could get, until I became partly reconciled to the oppression, and then turned to ascertain the condition of my companions. It was wretched beyond description. They were ragged, dirty, and crawling with vermin. Most of them were nearly naked; but this was no inconvenience there, for it was so warm that those who had clothes were obliged to take them off, and nearly all were in a state of nudity. I soon found it necessary myself to disrobe, and even then the perspiration poured off me most profusely. It was an atmosphere of death. Yet among the prisoners were old men, just trembling on the verge of the grave, who were arrested merely because they had ventured to express a preference for the old, well-tried Government, over the new, slave-built Confederacy. The cruelty practiced on the Tennessee Union men will never half be told. It forms the darkest page in the history of the war. In every prison of which I was an inmate in Georgia and Virginia, as well as in Tennessee, I found these miserable but patriotic men thus heartlessly immured. But I will speak more of them hereafter; at that time the thought of my own danger banished every other consideration.