That he may figure out these proportions for himself, I will repeat some of the elements of the problem:  We will say that an average City lot is thirty feet front by one hundred deep.  This is more front than most of them have, but we will be liberal.  This gives us a surface of three thousand square feet.  An acre contains forty-three thousand five hundred and sixty square feet.  Upon thirteen of these acres, we had eighteen thousand four hundred and fifty-four men.  After he has found the number of square feet that each man had for sleeping apartment, dining room, kitchen, exercise grounds and outhouses, and decided that nobody could live for any length of time in such contracted space, I will tell him that a few weeks later double that many men were crowded upon that space that over thirty-five thousand were packed upon those twelve and a-half or thirteen acres.

But I will not anticipate.  With the warm weather the condition of the swamp in the center of the prison became simply horrible.  We hear so much now-a-days of blood poisoning from the effluvia of sinks and sewers, that reading it, I wonder how a man inside the Stockade, and into whose nostrils came a breath of that noisomeness, escaped being carried off by a malignant typhus.  In the slimy ooze were billions of white maggots.  They would crawl out by thousands on the warm sand, and, lying there a few minutes, sprout a wing or a pair of them.  With these they would essay a clumsy flight, ending by dropping down upon some exposed portion of a man’s body, and stinging him like a gad-fly.  Still worse, they would drop into what he was cooking, and the utmost care could not prevent a mess of food from being contaminated with them.

All the water that we had to use was that in the creek which flowed through this seething mass of corruption, and received its sewerage.  How pure the water was when it came into the Stockade was a question.  We always believed that it received the drainage from the camps of the guards, a half-a-mile away.

A road was made across the swamp, along the Dead Line at the west side, where the creek entered the pen.  Those getting water would go to this spot, and reach as far up the stream as possible, to get the water that was least filthy.  As they could reach nearly to the Dead Line this furnished an excuse to such of the guards as were murderously inclined to fire upon them.  I think I hazard nothing in saying that for weeks at least one man a day was killed at this place.  The murders became monotonous; there was a dreadful sameness to them.  A gun would crack; looking up we would see, still smoking, the muzzle of the musket of one of the guards on either side of the creek.  At the same instant would rise a piercing shriek from the man struck, now floundering in the creek in his death agony.  Then thousands of throats would yell out curses and denunciations, and—­

“O, give the Rebel ——­ ——­ ——­ ——­ a furlough!”