possible forms. The majority of his comrades sank helplessly into this quaking bog. Out of fifty captured of his regiment, Williams, a delicate lad, sickened at once; Dean, a stout old Scotchman, was close on idiocy in a month; Allan, the color-bearer, was shot by the guard,--he had slipped near the dead line, and fallen with his head outside; fourteen were dead of disease; twelve more sank in rayless, hopeless apathy; and Drake--was busy on "A History of the Stockade Prison." The way in which he got the idea and his stationery is worth telling. There had fallen upon him a dread of motion,--a sombre endurance,--a discouraged sense of thirty thousand hopeless men dragging him down to despair,--a dark cloud that shut out God and home and help,--an inability to compose and fix his drowsy, reeling thought, that spun off dizzily to times at school, and love and laughter at home, and lapsed itself in forgetfulness, and ceased to be even dreamy speculation. Drake, in short, was going to the bottom with his theory about his neck, when a "Providence,"--the modern way of dodging an acknowledgment to God, whom, by the by, our poor boy had quite omitted in his little theory of self-preservation,--in the curious shape of an official blunder, stepped in to his rescue. A cook-house was in erection without the limits of their pen, and, though no carpenter, Drake was set with others to work under guard. The first glimpse of the open country, stretching away to meet the low horizon, brought back the half-forgotten thought of Freedom; and the very trail of her robe is so glorious, that even this poor savage liberty of rock and clod roused in him anew wit to devise and courage to endure. He worked then so merrily and with such good heart, that an admiring inspector more than hinted "at the pity it was to see a decent young fellow like him shut up in the pen yonder." "So I think," returned Drake, calmly, cutting away at his board. The official edged a little closer. "Why don't you come over to us, then? The Confederacy gives good wages. Our Government knows how to pay its men." "Right there!" retorted Drake. "The Confederacy pays its servants in death and ruin, which, as you say, are the just wages of a traitor. As for me, I want no more of Georgia soil than will make me a grave. That is as much as a man can own here now and be honest."