of the ruthless Confederate authorities.  It was confidently asserted that among the commoner occurrences within its confines was the stationing of a doomed prisoner against a certain bit of blood-stained, bullet-chipped wall, and relieving the Confederacy of all farther fear of him by the rifles of a firing party.  How well this dark reputation was deserved, no one but those inside the inner circle of the Davis Government can say.  It is safe to believe that more tragedies were enacted there than the archives of the Rebel civil or military judicature give any account of.  The prison was employed for the detention of spies, and those charged with the convenient allegation of “treason against the Confederate States of America.”  It is probable that many of these were sent out of the world with as little respect for the formalities of law as was exhibited with regard to the ‘suspects’ during the French Revolution.

Next we came to Castle Lightning, and here I bade adieu to my Tennessee companions.

A few squares more and we arrived at a warehouse larger than any of the others.  Over the door was a sign

Thomas Libby & son,
ship Chandlers and grocers.

This was the notorious “Libby Prison,” whose name was painfully familiar to every Union man in the land.  Under the sign was a broad entrance way, large enough to admit a dray or a small wagon.  On one side of this was the prison office, in which were a number of dapper, feeble-faced clerks at work on the prison records.

As I entered this space a squad of newly arrived prisoners were being searched for valuables, and having their names, rank and regiment recorded in the books.  Presently a clerk addressed as “Majah Tunnah,” the man who was superintending these operations, and I scanned him with increased interest, as I knew then that he was the ill-famed Dick Turner, hated all over the North for his brutality to our prisoners.

He looked as if he deserved his reputation.  Seen upon the street he would be taken for a second or third class gambler, one in whom a certain amount of cunning is pieced out by a readiness to use brute force.  His face, clean-shaved, except a “Bowery-b’hoy” goatee, was white, fat, and selfishly sensual.  Small, pig-like eyes, set close together, glanced around continually.  His legs were short, his body long, and made to appear longer, by his wearing no vest—­a custom common them with Southerners.

His faculties were at that moment absorbed in seeing that no person concealed any money from him.  His subordinates did not search closely enough to suit him, and he would run his fat, heavily-ringed fingers through the prisoner’s hair, feel under their arms and elsewhere where he thought a stray five dollar greenback might be concealed.  But with all his greedy care he was no match for Yankee cunning.  The prisoners told me afterward that, suspecting they would be searched, they had taken off the caps of the large, hollow brass buttons of their coats, carefully folded a bill into each cavity, and replaced the cap.  In this way they brought in several hundred dollars safely.