The first time this was done after our arrival he gave us a display of his wanton malevolence.  We were nearly all assembled on the East Side, and were standing in ranks, at the edge of the swamp, facing the west.  Barrett was walking along the opposite edge of the swamp, and, coming to a little gully jumped, it.  He was very awkward, and came near falling into the mud.  We all yelled derisively.  He turned toward us in a fury, shook his fist, and shouted curses and imprecations.  We yelled still louder.  He snatched out his revolver, and began firing at our line.  The distance was considerable—­say four or five hundred feet—­and the bullets struck in the mud in advance of the line.  We still yelled.  Then he jerked a gun from a guard and fired, but his aim was still bad, and the bullet sang over our heads, striking in the bank above us.  He posted of to get another gun, but his fit subsided before he obtained it.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

Christmas—­and the way the was passed—­the daily routine of ration drawing—­some peculiarities of living and dying.

Christmas, with its swelling flood of happy memories,—­memories now bitter because they marked the high tide whence our fortunes had receded to this despicable state—­came, but brought no change to mark its coming.  It is true that we had expected no change; we had not looked forward to the day, and hardly knew when it arrived, so indifferent were we to the lapse of time.

When reminded that the day was one that in all Christendom was sacred to good cheer and joyful meetings; that wherever the upraised cross proclaimed followers of Him who preached “Peace on Earth and good will to men,” parents and children, brothers and sisters, long-time friends, and all congenial spirits were gathering around hospitable boards to delight in each other’s society, and strengthen the bonds of unity between them, we listened as to a tale told of some foreign land from which we had parted forever more.

It seemed years since we had known anything of the kind.  The experience we had had of it belonged to the dim and irrevocable past.  It could not come to us again, nor we go to it.  Squalor, hunger, cold and wasting disease had become the ordinary conditions of existence, from which there was little hope that we would ever be exempt.

Perhaps it was well, to a certain degree, that we felt so.  It softened the poignancy of our reflections over the difference in the condition of ourselves and our happier comrades who were elsewhere.

The weather was in harmony with our feelings.  The dull, gray, leaden sky was as sharp a contrast with the crisp, bracing sharpness of a Northern Christmas morning, as our beggarly little ration of saltless corn meal was to the sumptuous cheer that loaded the dinner-tables of our Northern homes.