XIV — Miscellaneous
The Andersonville Post-Office
The following touching lines, by George H. Hollister, Esq., of Litchfield, Connecticut, are descriptive of an incident in the pen of the Union prisoners at Andersonville, Georgia. The war has elicited nothing more beautiful in description or of sadder interest:—
“No blanket round his wasted limbs,
Under the rainy sky he slept,
While, pointing his envenom’d shafts
Around him Death, the archer, crept.
He dream’d of hunger, and held out
His hand to clutch a little bread,
That a white angel with a torch,
Among the living and the dead,
Seem’d bearing, smiling as he went:
The vision waked him, as he spied
The post-boy follow’d by a crowd
Of famish’d prisoners, who cried
For letters—letters from their friends.
Crawling upon his hands and knees,
He hears his own name call’d, and, lo!
A letter from his wife he sees!
“Gasping for breath, he shriek’d aloud,
And, lost in nature’s blind eclipse,
Faltering amid the suppliant crowd,
Caught it and press’d it to his lips.
A guard who follow’d, red and wroth,
And flourishing a rusty brand,
Reviled him with a taunting oath,
And snatch’d the letter from his hand.
‘First pay the postage, whining wretch!’
Despair had made the prisoner brave:
‘Then give me back my money, sir!
I am a captive,—not a slave.
You took my money and my clothes;
Take my life, too,—but let me know
How Mary and the children are,
And I will bless you ere I go.’
“The very moonlight through his hands,
As he stood supplicating, shone,
And his sharp features shaped themselves
Into a prayer, and such a tone
Of anguish there was in his cry
For wife and children, that the guard—
Thinking upon his own—pass’d by
And left him swooning on the sward.
Beyond the ‘dead-line’ fell his head:
The eager sentry knew his mark,
And with a crash the bullet sped
Into his brain, and all was dark.
But when they turn’d his livid cheek
Up toward the light, the pale lips smiled,
Kissing a picture fair and meek
That held in either hand a child.”