Those of us who had read Shakspere could have exclaimed with Hamlet.—
“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing end them—To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,—’tis a consummation Devoutedly to be wished. To die,—to sleep;— To sleep! perchance to dream, aye there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause, there’s the respect, That makes calamity of so long a life; For who would bear the whips and scorn of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of misprized love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life: But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzled the will; And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;”
The all-wise Being has placed within us all, an instinctive dread of death; had it not been so, I fear many poor, miserable, hopeless, prisoners would have gone out of their misery by the suicide’s route.
Morning came and we were in North Carolina. We took the same route back as far as Augusta, Ga., that we had taken when on our way to Richmond, the autumn previous.
We suffered extremely on the way. We were not allowed to get off the cars for any purpose whatever, except to change cars. The guards brought us water in the bucket we had purloined from Danville. They were not particular where they procured it. They supplied us from the handiest place whether it was the water tank at a station, or from a stagnant pond or ditch by the side of the R. R. track.
The reader can imagine that such water was rank poison. The water in the ditches of the Carolina swamps was loaded with decayed vegetable matter; slimy snakes and filthy water reptiles crawled and swam in it, and taken all together it was not much better than the fetid waters of the Danville canal.