It appeared to me that I had but closed my eyes. I was still in the same reclining attitude, the groups opposite were still engaged in their card games, Wilkes was in the same position. Nothing had changed. I asked, ‘What _has_ happened?’ ‘What could happen?’ said he. ‘What makes you ask? It is but a moment ago you were speaking to me.’ ‘Oh, I thought I had been asleep a long time.’ On the next day, the 17th April, 1862, my Aunt Mary died at Fynnon Beuno! I believe that the soul of every human being has its attendant spirit,--a nimble and delicate essence, whose method of action is by a subtle suggestion which it contrives to insinuate into the mind, whether asleep or awake. We are too gross to be capable of understanding the signification of the dream, the vision, or the sudden presage, or of divining the source of the premonition, or its purport. We admit that we are liable to receive a fleeting picture of an act, or a figure, at any moment; but, except being struck by certain strange coincidences which happen to most of us, we seldom make an effort to unravel the mystery. The swift, darting messenger stamps an image on the mind, and displays a vision to the sleeper; and if, as sometimes follows, among tricks and twists of an errant mind, or reflex acts of the memory, it happens to be a true representation of what is to happen, or has happened, thousands of miles away, we are left to grope hopelessly as to the manner and meaning of it, for there is nothing tangible to lay hold of. There are many things relating to my existence which are inexplicable to me, and probably it is best so; this death-bed scene, projected on my mind’s screen, across four thousand five hundred miles of space, is one of these mysteries. After Wilkes and I had thoroughly acquainted ourselves with all the evil and the good to be found at Camp Douglas, neither of us saw any reason at first why we could not wait with patience for the exchange of prisoners. But, as time passed, we found it to be a dreary task to endure the unchanging variety of misery surrounding us. I was often tempted with an impulse to challenge a malignant sentry’s bullet, by crossing that ghastly ‘dead-line,’ which I saw every day I came out. A more unlovely sight than a sick Secessionist, in a bilious butternut, it is scarcely possible to conceive. Though he had been naked and soiled by his own filth, there would still have remained some elements of attractiveness in him; but that dirty, ill-made, nut-coloured homespun aggravated every sense, and made the poor, sickly wretch unutterably ugly.