When they had marched about three miles through a wasted and desolated country, they came to a cornfield, where a halt was ordered, and the prisoners were directed to help themselves, and permitted to rest. The corn was not near ripe, the ears when the husks were removed being little bigger than a man’s fore-finger, and the husks still soft; and the ground was wet with the recent heavy rains. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the famished and fatigued prisoners gladly filled their stomachs with this very green corn, devouring both grain and husks; and afterwards threw their wearied limbs down upon the damp ground—imprudences to be fearfully paid for in the disease and death that afterwards decimated the crowded population of Libby and Belle Isle. Having eaten and rested in this fatal manner, the order was given to rise and fall in line, and the march was resumed. All that burning day, when “the sky was brass,” they marched. Late in the afternoon they halted again in an orchard, and supped off green apples, and immediately resumed the march. It was near nightfall when they reached Richmond. There was a short halt, during which their arrival was formally reported to the proper authorities, and orders for their disposition taken. And then they were marched directly to the Libby and packed into a prison that was already crowded. For what follows I am indebted partly to personal observation, and partly to the report of an officer who was an inmate of that pest-house for several months. The Libby, as I saw it in May, 1865, is a great, strong, oblong building of the simplest structure. It stands quite alone, a whole block in itself, reaching each way from street to street. It fronts the water and the wharfs, and backs upon a city street—though front and back are so exactly alike that it is difficult to say which is which. It has no wall or yard around it. It stands barely and grimly out between the streets. It is of two stories, or, counting the ground floor, of three. Each story is divided, simply and equally, into three great halls, each big enough for an ordinary church, and running from front to back through the whole building. Each hall has its sides formed of solid masonry, and its ends of three immense doors, formed only of perpendicular iron bars, and reaching from the ceiling to the floor. Through these bars at the front may be seen the sidewalk, the river, the wharves, and the busy scenes of traffic; through the bars of the back a crowded city street. Through these opposite, open bars the ventilation is very good. There is neither bed, bench, water-jug or furniture of any sort in either hall. But in the right hand corner of the front there is, in each, a water spout and sink. So, amid all the miserable squalor and destitution of the Libby, there seemed to be three or four necessaries of life in plenty—light, air, water and an open view of earth and sky.