Then came a matter which at once added to my anxieties, and set work to my
hands which kept my mind from dwelling too darkly on its own troubles.

So crowded were all the war prisons up and down the land, and so continuous
was the stream of captives brought in by the war-ships, that death no
sooner made a vacancy amongst us than it was filled at once from the
overflowing quarters elsewhere.

We had fevers and agues constantly with us, and one time so sharp an
epidemic of small-pox that every man of us, will he nil he, had to submit
to the inoculation then newly introduced as a preventive against that most
horrible disease. Some of us believed, and rightly I think, that as good a
preventive as any against this or any ailment was the keeping of the body
in the fittest possible condition, and to that end we subjected ourselves
to the hardest exercise in every way we could contrive, and suffered I
think less than the rest.

As the long hard winter drew slowly past, and spring brightened the land
and our hearts, and set new life in both, my mind turned again to thoughts
of escape. While that bleak country lay in the grip of ice and snow it had
seemed certain death to quit the hard hospitality of the prison. It was
better to be alive inside than dead outside. But now the stirrings of life
without stirred the life within towards freedom, and I began to plan my
way.




CHAPTER XXIV