For some inscrutable reason the Rebels decided to vaccinate us all.  Why they did this has been one of the unsolved problems of my life.  It is true that there was small pox in the City, and among the prisoners at Danville; but that any consideration for our safety should have led them to order general inoculation is not among the reasonable inferences.  But, be that as it may, vaccination was ordered, and performed.  By great good luck I was absent from the building with the squad drawing rations, when our room was inoculated, so I escaped what was an infliction to all, and fatal to many.  The direst consequences followed the operation.  Foul ulcers appeared on various parts of the bodies of the vaccinated.  In many instances the arms literally rotted off; and death followed from a corruption of the blood.  Frequently the faces, and other parts of those who recovered, were disfigured by the ghastly cicatrices of healed ulcers.  A special friend of mine, Sergeant Frank Beverstock—­then a member of the Third Virginia Cavalry, (loyal), and after the war a banker in Bowling Green, O.,—­bore upon his temple to his dying day, (which occurred a year ago), a fearful scar, where the flesh had sloughed off from the effects of the virus that had tainted his blood.

This I do not pretend to account for.  We thought at the time that the Rebels had deliberately poisoned the vaccine matter with syphilitic virus, and it was so charged upon them.  I do not now believe that this was so; I can hardly think that members of the humane profession of medicine would be guilty of such subtle diabolism—­worse even than poisoning the wells from which an enemy must drink.  The explanation with which I have satisfied myself is that some careless or stupid practitioner took the vaccinating lymph from diseased human bodies, and thus infected all with the blood venom, without any conception of what he was doing.  The low standard of medical education in the South makes this theory quite plausible.

We now formed the acquaintance of a species of human vermin that united with the Rebels, cold, hunger, lice and the oppression of distraint, to leave nothing undone that could add to the miseries of our prison life.

These were the fledglings of the slums and dives of New York—­graduates of that metropolitan sink of iniquity where the rogues and criminals of the whole world meet for mutual instruction in vice.

They were men who, as a rule, had never known, a day of honesty and cleanliness in their misspent lives; whose fathers, brothers and constant companions were roughs, malefactors and, felons; whose mothers, wives and sisters were prostitutes, procuresses and thieves; men who had from infancy lived in an atmosphere of sin, until it saturated every fiber of their being as a dweller in a jungle imbibes malaria by every one of his, millions of pores, until his very marrow is surcharged with it.