that. If I ketch ye at this sort of work again, d----d ef I don't kill
ye ez soon ez I ketch ye."

And so on, ad infinitum. How long the boys were kept up there undergoing
this torture can not be said. Perhaps it was an hour or more. To the
locker-on it seemed long hours, to the poor fellows themselves it was
ages. When they were let down at last, all fainted, and were carried
away to the hospital, where they were weeks in recovering from the
effects. Some of them were crippled for life.

When we came into the prison there were about eleven thousand there.
More uniformly wretched creatures I had never before seen. Up to the
time of our departure from Andersonville the constant influx of new
prisoners had prevented the misery and wasting away of life from becoming
fully realized. Though thousands were continually dying, thousands more
of healthy, clean, well-clothed men were as continually coming in from
the front, so that a large portion of those inside looked in fairly good
condition. Put now no new prisoners had come in for months; the money
which made such a show about the sutler shops of Andersonville had been
spent; and there was in every face the same look of ghastly emaciation,
the same shrunken muscles and feeble limbs, the same lack-luster eyes and
hopeless countenances.

One of the commonest of sights was to see men whose hands and feet were
simply rotting off. The nights were frequently so cold that ice a
quarter of an inch thick formed on the water. The naked frames of
starving men were poorly calculated to withstand this frosty rigor, and
thousands had their extremities so badly frozen as to destroy the life in
those parts, and induce a rotting of the tissues by a dry gangrene.
The rotted flesh frequently remained in its place for a long time