“Yes;” the Major added, “and sometimes prisoners in the hands of the enemy were set on fire by the inhuman officers who wished to witness their terrible sufferings. We found the use of petroleum as a beverage was in various ways an injury to the army, so we gave it up.”
This wonderful story was heard with apparent confidence by our fellow travellers, and I have no doubt that it was told round British firesides in perfect good faith. The Judge and his friends talked of snow-storms a hundred feet deep, of potatoes in South Carolina as large as flour-barrels, of oysters in Texas that sing and play the piano, and of a horse in Cincinnati that could swear and chew tobacco. Wonderful adventures in all parts of the land were minutely described, and if the voyage had lasted a week longer, and the stories could all be collected and published, they could give Baron Munchausen several points and beat him. The wags described bloody encounters of men in the West, and left the impression that anywhere beyond the Hudson River a { 043}person who by accident brushes against the elbow of another is shot down immediately.
In the same spirit of mischief they tortured the timid youth till he did not know what he was about. He was not so good a subject as one with whom I crossed the Atlantic some years before; but he did very well. The principal joke played upon him was to talk of accidents when he was at hand.
The other man of whom I speak--the one of several years ago--was the victim of a regular conspiracy. Some of the passengers arranged to talk in his presence of nothing but accidents; no matter what topic they were discussing, when he came near they shifted to accidents at once. When they ran out of true stories they resorted to fiction, and the fiction was worse by far than the fact.
He--the victim--used to remain up until sent down below by the officers, and he generally slept with a life preserver beside him. One day when some boxes and cans were being thrown overboard, his tormentors got up a story that the barometer had been falling about an inch an hour, and that a terrible gale was expected. The Captain feared that we could not live through it, and had thrown out these sealed boxes, containing duplicates of the government dispatches and other important papers, in the hope that some more fortunate vessel might find them, in case we were destroyed.