The latrines were all at the rear of our plank barracks, and each time imperious nature compelled us to resort to them, we lost a little of that respect and consideration we owed our fellow-creatures. For, on the way thither, we saw crowds of sick men, who had fallen, prostrate from weakness, and given themselves wholly to despair; and, while they crawled or wallowed in their filth, they cursed and blasphemed as often as they groaned. In the edge of the gaping ditches, which provoked the gorge to look at, there were many of the sick people, who, unable to leave, rested there for hours, and made their condition hopeless by breathing the stenchful atmosphere. Exhumed corpses could not have presented anything more hideous than dozens of these dead-and-alive men, who, oblivious to the weather, hung over the latrines, or lay extended along the open sewer, with only a few gasps intervening between them and death. Such as were not too far gone prayed for death, saying, ‘Good God, let me die! Let me go, O Lord!’ and one insanely damned his vitals and his constitution, because his agonies were so protracted. No self-respecting being could return from their vicinity without feeling bewildered by the infinite suffering, his existence degraded, and religion and sentiment blasted. Yet, indoors, what did we see? Over two hundred unwashed, unkempt, uncombed men, in the dismalest attitudes, occupied in relieving themselves from hosts of vermin, or sunk in gloomy introspection, staring blankly, with heads between their knees, at nothing; weighed down by a surfeit of misery, internal pains furrowing their faces, breathing in a fine cloud of human scurf, and dust of offensive hay, dead to everything but the flitting fancies of the hopeless! One intelligent and humane supervisor would have wrought wonders at this period with us, and arrested that swift demoralization with which we were threatened. None of us were conspicuously wise out of our own sphere; and of sanitary laws we were all probably as ignorant as of the etiology of sclerosis of the nerve-centres. In our colossal ignorance, we were perhaps doing something half-a-dozen times a day, as dangerous as eating poison, and constantly swallowing a few of the bacilli of typhus. Even had we possessed the necessary science at our finger-tips, we could not have done much, unaided by the authorities; but when the authorities were as ignorant as ourselves,--I cannot believe their neglect of us was intentional,--we were simply doomed! Every morning, the wagons came to the hospital and dead-house, to take away the bodies; and I saw the corpses rolled in their blankets, taken to the vehicles, and piled one upon another, as the New Zealand frozen-mutton carcases are carted from the docks!