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CHAPTER V.

THE NASHVILLE PRISON.

THE next day was Sunday. I rose early, and going down to the office found my friend the Colonel already stirring. "Ah," he said, as I bade him "good-morning," "I'm in luck. An orderly has come in with my horse, and an ambulance goes out under an escort this morning. In half an hour I shall be off."

[Triune was distant only eighteen miles, but the road was infested with guerillas, and was unsafe for single travellers.]

"I am glad for that, on your account, but sorry on my own. I had reckoned on your aid in procuring access to my friends at the prison."

"You'll have no difficulty about that. Call on Colonel Martin at the Capitol; tell him who you are, and he'll give you a permit."

After breakfast, with mutual expressions of good-will we parted. I have formed many agreeable acquaintances while travelling, but never one more agreeable than the sturdy Indiana Colonel. He had a frank, glowing, genial nature that attracted me irresistibly to him, just as one is attracted to a warm wood fire on a winter evening. Indeed he is somehow associated in my mind with a generous wood fire—one of the glorious, oldfashioned kind; of oaken logs, piled high on a broad hearth, and giving out oxygen enough to supply a small village,

When he was gone, the landlord said to me, "If you don't know none of the military folk, Sir, you stand a sorry chance of gittin' inter the prison. Ye see, they karn't admit them as they don't know. 'Twouldn't do, nohow."

If that was true, I was in a dilemma. I had provided against such a contingency by taking with me, on leaving home, half a dozen introductory letters to Governor Johnson, but that gentleman was not in Nashville, and might not arrive for a week, therefore they were of no present value.

As I sat down to ponder over "the situation," I suddenly remembered having heard that the son of an old friend was an officer in a Tennessee regiment. "Landlord," I said, addressing the publican-(he told me he was also a Re-publican, but other trustworthy persons assured me that he was a rabid rebel. This I thought accounted for the filthy condition of his establishment). "Landlord," I said, "can you tell me where the Tennessee is stationed ?"

"Here, Sir; 'bout two miles out-nigh to Fort Negley."

This was agreeable news, and writing a few lines to the young Tennesseean, in which I alluded to my long friendship with his father, and asked him "to come over and help" me. I despatched a messenger at once to the camp. In about an hour the negro returned, but with the unwelcome tidings that "de Cap'n am off, Sar; off scoutin' it, Sar, and dey doan't know when he'll be back, but dey reckon he'll come yere, d'recly he come, Sar; d'recly he come, Sar."

The morning was passing away while I was thus casting about for an escort, and at last I determined to do what I should have done at first-set out alone.

As I climbed the steep hill which leads to the Capitol, I was

struck with the gloomy aspect of the silent, sombre houses, and the noiseless, deserted streets. It was a bright, summer-like day, and near the hour for morning service; but, with the exception of a solitary soldier, or a smartly-dressed darkey, sauntering idly along, no one was abroad. The white population had mostly fled, and the few that remained welcomed the "Northern intruders" with bolted doors and barred windows. I realized I was walking the streets of a conquered city. Arrived at the Capitol-an imposing pile of white marble, more spacious and beautiful than any similar edifice in the Northern States-I found myself under the walls of a huge fortress, frowning with cannon and encircled with breast works. Its marble steps were flanked by stockades, and its broad battlements crowned with artillery, which, from its elevated position, commanded the entire town and surrounding suburbs. In the distance, the Casino and Forts Negley and Confiscation looked down from rocky elevations, and beyond them a broad belt of military camps engirdled the captive city. To my unpractised eye the defences seemed, as they no doubt are, impregnable, and with what emotions must they be contemplated by Nashville's tobacco lords, who skulking back from exile in Dixie, stand now and then on those neighboring hills, and look down on the homes their own mad treason has shut them out from for

ever.

Approaching the sentinel at the principal stairway, I said: "Will you tell me where to find Colonel Martin ?"

"An shoore an' I 'will, Sir. Foller the grand hall till ye come forninst the Guv'ner's room-ye'll spy it over the dhoor, thin, say nothin' to nobody, but go straight in, Sir, an' ax fur the Cunnel, an' ye'll have him."

"Thank you. And pray, what brought you here-all the way from auld Ireland."

"Fath, yer honor, an' I come to fight—to fight for the naygur" and he shrugged his shoulders, as if what he said might not be strictly true.

"You don't mean that."

"Troth, an' I does. I niver loiked the black divils-though them as is here hain't black, fur they's yaller-till I come out to fight fur 'em; but I've sort o' takin' to 'em since. An Irishman, ye knows, if he's niver a hapenny in his pocket, has allers a feller feelin' für a poor divil as is poorer thin he is—an' sorry a bit of any thing in the world has the naygur. He don't own his own children, Sir; not avin the flesh on his bones."

"Your kindred, where I live, are not of your way of thinking." "An' where may that be, yer honor ?”

"In New York."

"Oh, yis, I know; they's all Dimocrats there, an' Fernandy Wud Dimocrats at that bad luck to thim. If you'd loike to kinvart 'em, Sir, jest send 'em out here. I warrant ye they won't be four an' twenty 'oours in the State till they's Black Republicans as black as the naygurs themselves. An Irishman's a heart in him, Sir, an', be he can't see the poor craytures wid his own eyes widout havin' a feller feelin' fur 'em."

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gorry,

'Well, good-by, and good luck to you."

"Good-by, an' good luck to yerself, yer honor;" and he called out as I passed up the stairway, "Go straight on, yer honor, an' say nothin' to nobody; but ax fur the Cunnel, an' ye'll find him, right forninst the Guv'ner's room, ye mind, its over the dhoor."

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over the

I found the "Governor's room," in blazing gilt, dhoor," and entered the opposite apartment. I had less difficulty than I had anticipated in procuring access to the prison. The potent "open sesame" were certain names I carried in my pocket, and in less than half an hour I was on my way elate with the expectation of shortly seeing "my Southern friends."

The Nashville Penitentiary was burned at the taking of the city by the Union forces. The building now used as a State Prison is located about a mile outside of the city limits, and is of brick, surrounded by a high wall covering an area of perhaps two acres. It was built, as I learned from a marble slab imbedded in the wall over the doorway, in 1828, and looks substantial enough to last for a dozen centuries. As I approached its broad entrance-way, I saw at my right, in a spacious yard surrounded by a low stone fence, a hundred or more motleyuniformed Confederates, engaged in the favorite out-door occupations of their class, such as "seven-up," "quoits," "pitch and toss," and "chuck-a-luck." A sad-visaged man, dressed in seedy black, was pacing to and fro among them, now and then pausing to gaze abstractedly at the players, and again walking on, his eyes fixed on the distance, as if searching for some sign of "the good time" which every mortal thinks is "coming.” Το him, poor man, it is a long way off, for he will not go out, he says; until the South is independent. He was the political editor of The Baptist Standard, and refusing to take the oath of allegiance, has been confined there sevén long months. A few more decently clad persons were in the assemblage, but much the larger portion were the most wretched specimens of "white trash" I had ever seen. In all sorts of habilimentscoatless, hatless, shoeless, with matted hair and dirt-incrusted

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