The military prisons of St. Louis were sanitary and well kept. No one within them was permitted unnecessarily to suffer. All had enough wholesome food. The fare of the prisoners was as good as that of the soldiers who guarded them. In winter, so far as it was possible, they were kept warm and comfortably clad. Most of them were incarcerated, not for ordinary criminal acts, but because taken in arms against the United States, or detected in aiding those who were intent on breaking up the Union. Not a few of them had been accustomed to the luxuries of life, and could not but contrast their prison with the homes from which they had come. Still, while they inevitably suffered more or less, taking everything into consideration, the government treated them with great leniency. Their friends were often permitted not only to minister to their necessities, but also to eke out their prison fare with the delicacies of the season. But a few incidents, which came under my observation, and in some of which I was an active participant, will more clearly reveal what transpired in those military prisons than any general statements that I could make, however full and just they might be. Early in the war I received a note from an officer at the Arsenal, stating that the son of an honored Baptist minister of Illinois was a prisoner in the Guard-house and wished me to visit him. I at once went to see the young man in his prison-house. I found him in a wretched plight. The Guard-house was far from being a model of neatness. The young man’s clothing was begrimed and repulsive, his face and hands unwashed, his hair unkempt, and to his foot was riveted a chain to which was attached a heavy iron ball. He was cowed in spirit, and had nearly lost heart and hope. He timidly told me his story. He was a boy scarcely out of his teens. He had patriotically enlisted in the Union army, but having had a very imperfect notion of the rigorous discipline to which every soldier must necessarily be subjected, he had grown weary of his task and more than once had tried to desert, not fully realizing how heinous his offence was. I saw at a glance that, instead of being cast down on account of his heavy punishment, he ought to be grateful that he had not been court-martialed and shot. While his condition aroused my sympathy, I laid before him the gravity of his crime, then vainly pleaded with the military authorities for his release. They argued that his offence was so great he richly deserved further punishment, and that his release would be detrimental to the discipline of the army. The boy at last became very sick in his prison. His father, large both in body and in heart, came, and so put the case of his son before the officers in command, that they discharged him from the army.