Your country mourns your hapless fate; So mourn we prisoners all; You’ve paid the debt we all must pay, Each sailor, great and small. Your body on this barren moor,-- Your soul in Heaven doth rest, Where Yankee sailors, one and all, Hereafter will be blest. The agent permitted us to put this stone up, and of the many thousands that lay indiscriminately mingled together upon this moor, this stone recorded the only syllable of the dead buried here. The life of these men is finely described in Holy Writ by the path of an arrow, which is immediately closed up and lost. We received our monthly pay as usual, and nothing remarkable occurred during the remainder of the month; few persons arrived, but we had expectation of a great number. The weather was rainy and cold; the prisoners generally healthy; few died, but the prison was very much crowded, there being 1,500 in No. 4. At the commencement of August, a draft of prisoners arrived, who had been recently captured on the coast of Europe, among whom were four men lately belonging to the private armed schooner Surprise, of Baltimore; these four men, on their first arrival at this depot, were put into close confinement in the cachot, there to remain on two-thirds allowance, without hammock or bed, sleeping on the stone floor, during their whole imprisonment. When the cause of their confinement was known, it seems it had grown out of the following circumstances: The Surprise was cruising in the channel of England, and fell in with, and captured, a schooner, and put on board her these four men, to take charge of the prize. Shortly after, the prize was recaptured by an English frigate, and, after taking possession of her, found stowed away in the round-house (which is a few feet above the deck) a cask of powder, which contained but a few pounds at most, and on examination they found part of a match and a candle; the captain of the frigate, being suspicious of these four men’s having an intention to blow the vessel up, took them and committed them to close confinement until he arrived in England; he then reported them to the Board of Transport, and delivered them into their custody, and they, from these suspicious circumstances, sentenced them to the punishment above mentioned. Whether the crime, had it been well proved, would warrant so rigorous a punishment, is not the subject of investigation; they had the power to treat them as they pleased, nor had the sufferers any redress, for, _inter armis lages silent_, “the laws are silent amid arms.”