No cooking-utensils were allowed the prisoner; no blankets were allowed the prisoner; no shelter of any sort was allowed the prisoner; no tools or materials to construct a shelter were allowed the prisoner; no means of living as a civilized man were allowed the prisoner; no way of helping himself as a savage was allowed the prisoner. The rations were at all times insufficient, and frequently so foul that starvation itself could not swallow them: consequence, stomach and body weakened by a perpetual hunger, and in many cases utter inability to retain food, good or bad. More than that, the sluggish water-course that served as their reservoir crept across their pen foul and thick with the _débris_ of the Rebel camp above, and in the centre filtered through the spongy ground, and creamed and mantled and spread out loathsomely into a hateful swamp; and the fierce sun, beating down on its slimy surface, drew from its festering pools and mounds of refuse a vapor of death, and the prisoners breathed it; and the reek of unwashed and diseased bodies crowding close on each other, and the sickening, pestilential odor of a huge camp without sewerage or system of policing, made the air a horror, and the prisoners breathed it. Drake woke, stifling with the heat and horrible steam, and turning and throwing out his arm, only yet half awake, struck on something cold and stiff: the corpse of some poor fellow who had died there in the night beside him. Drake, in a two years' campaign, had grown familiar with death, but could not yet receive him as a bed-fellow, and scrambled up in sickening horror to a day in which there was no breakfast to eat, no arms to clean, no shoes to black, no dress to change, no work of any sort to do, no letters to write or hope for, no books to read, no dinner to prepare, at least till four P.M., when they served out rations,--nothing to fix the eye, or offer subject of thought, but the general and utter wretchedness. Nor could Drake and his fellows take refuge in that unconscious self-gratulation with which we see the miseries of our neighbors; for the future here threw shadows backward. That skeleton, (I use the word not in the exaggerated sense in which 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