They
were peasants, and of a very low order; a class of people with whom our
Northern rural population has not a single trait in common. They were
exceedingly respectful,--more so than a rustic New-Englander ever dreams
of being towards anybody, except perhaps his minister; and had they worn
any hats they would probably have been self-constrained to take them off,
under the unusual circumstance of being permitted to hold conversation
with well-dressed persons. It is my belief that not a single bumpkin of
them all (the moustached soldier always excepted) had the remotest
comprehension of what they had been fighting for, or how they had
deserved to be shut up in that dreary hole; nor, possibly, did they care
to inquire into this latter mystery, but took it as a godsend to be
suffered to lie here in a heap of unwashed human bodies, well warmed and
well foddered to-day, and without the necessity of bothering themselves
about the possible hunger and cold of to-morrow. Their dark prison-life
may have seemed to them the sunshine of all their lifetime.
There was one poor wretch, a wild-beast of a man, at whom I gazed with
greater interest than at his fellows; although I know not that each one
of them, in their semi-barbarous moral state, might not have been capable
of the same savage impulse that had made this particular individual a
horror to all beholders.
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