WE are now fairly launched upon the mysterious ocean of Libby life. Before embarking, however, we have had our pockets well searched by the prison warden, and everything deemed to be of a contraband nature has been confiscated. Most of us possessed but little that warranted the search, having bartered away, to obtain food, all' our dispensable articles, during our sojourn in the valley of Virginia. Soon after crossing the Potomac, southward bound, there were numerous melancholy instances of a breakfast made on a pocket-knife, a dinner off a felt hat, and a supper off a pair of boots. One officer had subsisted for three days on a Colt's revolver.

The room we are in is long, low, dingy, gloomy, and suffocating. Some two hundred officers are lying packed in rows along the floor, sleeping the heavy, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. But there are some who cannot sleep ; they are thinking of the camp, of home, and of friends ; they are quarreling with the fortune of war ; they are longing for the termination of a loathsome and hateful captivity, which has only just begun. By-and-by even the most wakeful yield to the imperative demand for rest, and with one arm for a pillow, have stretched themselves out on the bare floor.
The shadows, as they thicken on the prison walls, seem to be spreading over these long files of stirless, outstretched men, the black pall of a living death. It may be many days, many months, before the free, pure air of Heaven fans their temples again, and before the cheerful sunshine once more traces their shadows upon the green, scented grass.

The day has dawned clear and full of sunlight. I look out of the window on the James river. Immediately below is the canal ; beyond it flows the river, with a rapid, murmuring current, reflecting here and there the purple flush of the morning clouds ; there is a cluster of tall factories on the opposite bank ; beyond these is the village of Manchester on one side, and on the other are broad fields, and the rolling hills which fringe a distant curve of the river. Looking up-stream, there is a lovely little island, three long white bridges which span the stream, half concealed by the thick foliage, and beyond these, a full mile off, is Belle Isle, with some white tents crowning an eminence. The scene is beautiful at this hour, bathed in the rich roseate mist of early morning, which pours over the gilded edges of the eastern clouds as if it overflowed from a golden vase.

I pass to another window : this one looks upon the street. Yonder building, with the barred windows, I am told, is " Castle Thunder," and on the opposite side of the street may be just seen the gable end of another prison, known by the significant title of the Cage." Nearer is an antiquated Meeting House; then comes a negro shanty, a stable, a church, an empty lot, and a large warehouse, used as a convalescent hospital for Confederate soldiers ; place behind these some rows of brick dwellings, by way of a horizon, and a pretty correct idea may be formed of what we are destined to behold every day during our sojourn here. This, with the group of tents, the headquarters of the guard, at the opposite corner of the street, and a row of sentries pacing up and down on the pavement below, is all that the windows of Libby offer in the way of an immediate prospect.

Now for the Libby itself. It stands close by the Lynchburg canal, and in full view from the river. It is a capacious warehouse, built of brick and roofed with tin. It was a busy place previous to the Rebellion; barrels and bales obstructed the stone side-walk which surrounds the building on all four of its sides ; barrels and boxes were being constantly hoisted in and -hoisted out ; numberless boats lined the canal in front of it, and loaded drays rattled over the cobble pavement of Carey street. There was a signboard at an angle of the building, whereon you might have read in black letters on a white ground : " Libby & Sons, Ship Chandlers and Grocers." This sign-board is still at its post ; but a wondrous change has come over the place. There are now no bales and boxes coming in at one end, and going out at the other ; no laden boats on the canal ; no drays rattling over the stone pave. There is something about it indicative of the grave, and, indeed, it is a sort of unnatural tomb, whose pale, wan habitants gaze vacantly out through the barred windows on the passer-by, as if they were peering from the mysterious precincts of another world.

The building has a front of about one hundred and forty feet, with a depth of about one hundred and five. There are nine rooms, each one hundred and two feet long by forty-five wide. The height of ceilings from the floor, is about seven feet ; except in the upper story, which is better ventilated owing to the pitch of the roof. At each end of these rooms are five windows.

Nothing but bread has, as yet, been issued to us, half a loaf twice a day, per man. This must be washed down with James River water, drawn from a hydrant over the wash-trough. To-morrow, we are to be indulged with the luxury of bacon-soup.

There are sonic filthy blankets hanging about the room ; they have been used time and again by the many who have preceded us ; they are soiled, worn, and filled with vermin, but we are recommended to help ourselves in time ; if we do so with reluctance and profound disgust it is because we are now more particular than we will be by-and-by.

We have tasted of the promised soup : it is boiled water sprinkled with rice, and seasoned with the rank juices of stale bacon ; we must shut our eyes to eat it; the bacon, I have no doubt, might have walked into the pot of its own accord. It is brought up to us in wooden buckets, and we eat it, in most cases without spoons, out of tin-cups. " Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?"

It has been raining for several days. How much more gloomy the prison looks, robbed of the little scattering sunlight which, on clear clays, comes creeping timidly in between the window-bars 1 The effect on the minds of all in the prison is very perceptible there is a tendency to lie about on the floor, to grumble, to be irritable, to have the blues. No wonder. The little ration of sunshine which Heaven is wont to issue to us is cut off There is, here, something delightful in letting a ray of sparkling sunshine fall upon one's face ; you can sit and look at it for hours. The pleasure which it affords is not difficult to account for : this sunlight comes from the sky, pure, and untainted ; it comes, free and unshackled, from without ; it is a link between the captive and that liberty which he has learned to prize so dearly ; it is a golden bridge over which his thoughts, rendered morbid by gloomy reveries, pass out through the prison-bars, and go forth into the free realm of space, to wander wheresoever they will.

The rain pattering on the tin roof overhead has a mournful sound. It is singular how this music of the beating rain will always carry one back, far back, into child-life ; it is apt to have a strange, sad influence on us whenever we hear it ; but nowhere so strange, nor so sad, as in a prison.

We have received permission to purchase provisions outside the prison. We have elected an officer, of the Quartermasters' Department, to be our " Commissary-in-Chief." He has divided us into messes of fifteen to twenty, and we are to do our own cooking ; stoves are being put up, and the cook-room partitioned off. It is a great privilege to be allowed to cook for ourselves 1 An assistant commissary is elected for each mess : to these the chief commissary issues, and they in their turn issue to the cooks. The hours are so distributed that more than two hundred may be able to cook on two small stoves. The prison authorities issue meat and rice, of which we will make soup; with the boiled meat from the soup a hash will be made for breakfast next morning. All extras will be at the expense of individuals. Rye Coffee sells at one dollar per pound; sugar, three dollars ; eggs, two dollars per dozen; butter, four dollars per pound.-So much for our culinary prospects.

The officers of the gunboats " Satellite" and " Reliance" are now with us. It is humorously rumored in, the prison that they were captured by a desperate charge of the Rebel cavalry on the gunboats. These jolly tars will suffer less than the landsmen from their imprisonment ; they have only to imagine themselves in the hold of some huge three-decker, during a dead calm.

There has been much excitement in the city about a rumored movement of Federal troops up the Peninsula with the design of capturing the capital ; the bells all over the city were rung this morning, and only *a few moments ago, being attracted to the window by an unusual rattling of wheels on the street, we had a glimpse of one of the celebrated "Mule Batteries" which fulmine over Rebeldom, and whose bellicose braying is no doubt destined to strike terror into the hearts of the northern barbarians.

It is difficult for one who has never before been compelled to look out upon the world from behind the bars of a prison, to convince himself of the fact that he is really deprived of his liberty. There is a merry group of children, romping and playing near the river ; I listen to their joyous laughter, and, somehow, it has a very mournful sound. Most people have sighed, at times, to be young again; that sigh is a longer and a deeper one when we yearn, not only for the happy insouciance of childhood, but for its freedom also. These thoughtless little ones romping and laughing under the very windows of our prisonhouse ; these happy hearts beating quick with the excitement of their merry sport in the pleasant shadows of a summer afternoon, how near are they to other and older hearts which are heavy with the gloom of captivity. But is not this after all a counter-part of the great world, in which, Mde. De Stael remarks, one half is always laughing at the other half ? Truly joy and sorrow, good and evil, how near grow they to one another in the vale of human life ! The passers-by on the pave below, with what indifference they glance up at the pale faces that peer out between the bars.

These are not the pleasantest reflections in the world, but they are such as force themselves upon the mind of a prisoner. When Hood wrote in the "Bridge of Sighs" the line "Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world," he must have been thinking of a place not much worse than this we are now in. I can imagine a " Convict Ship" on its way to Australia--far out in mid-ocean-with nothing but a limitless waste of blue water around it, and nothing but a limitless waste of blue air above it-and crowded with sorrowing human beings. It seems to me that this prison bears some resemblance to it. We are indeed much like so many passengers, who feel that in a common danger and a common fate, there is much that creates a mutual interest. Our ship-simile might be carried very far, but it is too vivid to be pleasant. Ours is a voyage, not of pleasure, but of necessity ; there is no convivial wine in our locker over which to toast the friends we love, and wherein to drown the tedium of the journey; we are on short, very short rations ; and, to replace sea-sickness, we have a fearful substitute in home-sickness, by far the more trying of the two.

I am interrupted in my profound reflections by the sudden influx into the room of a dozen negroes carrying buckets and brooms. I know but too well what this portends. It is scrubbing-day. These are the clouds which portend the storm.

All that has ever been written, grumbled, or soliloquized, by forlorn and outraged husbands driven from the sanctity of their homes on those dismal occasions when their demented spouses have been seized with the "scrubbing-fever," , and have pulled up all the carpets in the house, and crowded the furniture in pyramidal confusion in all the by-ways, and have lathered the floors, and the stairs, and the windows, and have rendered the entire premises fit to be inhabited, for the next twenty-four hours, only by improbable web-footed husbands of aquatic propensities,-when the flying spray of soap and water is dashed into their faces even from the doors of their private sanctums, and splashed over their best beaver from the parlor window-panes,-when, in fine, the whole female household seems to have gone stark mad with an irrepressible insanity for soap-suds,--all, I repeat, that has ever been uttered, under circumstances so aggravating, by exasperated husbands, cannot do justice to a scrubbing-clay in the Libby. For the anti-lavatory husband can at least, when hotly pressed by the enemy, make good his retreat out of the front door : here, there is no line of escape Everything, pretty much, that you possess, your bed, your baggage, and your dinner, are on the floor, and that floor, will be in a few moments a tempestuous ocean of splashing, filthy water. You may baffle the foe, perhaps, for a short time, by rapid and well-conducted retreats to little islands of dry floor here and there, where you stand on tip-toe, your blanket over your shoulders, your day's rations in one hand, and your coffee-pot in the other ; but you will, finally, be compelled to surrender, and resign yourself to your watery fate.

There is only one other day, with us, which can, in any manner compare with the tortures and the terrors of this : that is, " whitewashing" day. You are then harassed, not from below, but from above ; this operation seems to have been invented by the fiendish ingenuity of some monster in human shape, for the express purpose of completing the ruin of your already dilapidated wardrobe. Your only coat is sure to come out of the ordeal spotted and streaked with white down the back ; your only hat will look as if you had just come in from a severe snow-storm, and you will walk about the rest of the day like a sort of hitherto undiscovered specimen of the Leopard family, deeming yourself fortunate enough, if you do not create a, to you, unaccountable laugh wherever you go, by a snow-flake of lime glued on to the end of your nose.

In order to while away, to some extent, the tedium of our monotonous life, we have, among other pastimes, organized a Lyceum, or Debating Club. The scenes which it, at times presents, are worthy the graphic pencil of an artist. The chairman sits on the floor á la .Turque, the "chair" itself being an empty name, without any local existence. The members sit in a circle on the floor, like Indian Chiefs at a war council.

The debates are very spirited, and grave questions, involving the destinies of the whole human race, and the future destiny of " Our great Country," are discussed with intense enthusiasm, sometimes even with political virulence, and not seldom with very bad grammar. .

An eloquent orator, naked to the waist [for the weather is very warm], rises on his bare feet, and flourishes his sleeveless arms about in a style as imposing and forcible as it is original. He is portraying, with the glowing and picturesque colors of an inspired imagination, the sublime beauties of the ancient philosophy. He is patriotically suicidal with Socrates ; suicidally heroic with Cato ; astutely critical with Horace ; mysteriously profound with Seneca, and profoundly mysterious with Cicero, when lie is ludicrously interrupted by a vociferous call from the cook-house, of " Fall in, small messes, for your black beans !" A shrewd debater on the negative side of the question, taking immediate advantage of this laughable interruption, rises promptly and obtains the " floor." He reviews rapidly, but with remarkable perspicacity, the fallacious arguments of his shirtless predecessor ; overturns the illogical conclusions to which " the gentleman on the affirmative side who has just addressed you," would lead the intelligent members of the Association ; scatters to the four winds of Heaven all the philosophy of the past, all the philosophy of the present, and all the philosophy of the future ; and, in conclusion, triumphantly calls the attention of the learned chairman to the scanty wardrobe of his misguided opponent, as circumstantially corroborative of the scantiness of his wit.

All this is quite comical and perfectly harmless, and aids admirably in passing away the time ; no one would think, therefore, of discountenancing the " Lyceum." Besides, it publishes a newspaper, called the " Libby Chronicle," which is edited by a witty and intelligent chaplain, and which descants with considerable acumen upon the various occurrences of our prison-life. When the reading of the Chronicle is announced throughout the building, which occurs, generally, once a week, there is a great rush to listen to its contents. The audience collects in a circle on the floor, and the Editor, standing in the centre, reads the various articles from the slips of paper on which they have been written. This mode of publication, besides being quite economical, is decidedly sociable.

One of the officers lectures to us, on the subject of mesmerism. He tells us about the electric fluid which permeates all space, about clairvoyance, about the magnetic spheres, and about many other interesting facts connected with the mesmeric science. The fact, whether mesmerism be a science, however, is caviled at by some of the medical faculty present, and at the succeeding meeting of the Lyceum, the allimportant question : " Is Mesmerism a true science ?" is discussed with much warmth, and at great length. The Faculty being reinforced by an astute correspondent of the New York Tribune, assail the mesmeric party with redoubled energy, and finally, so much is said, on both sides, that the learned chairman of the Debating Association, bewildered at first by the rapid discharges, from the opposing batteries, of all sorts of technical canister and scientific grape, and lost, soon afterwards, in a labyrinth of anatomical dissertations and a complication of magnetic incomprehensibilities, is drawn into a vortex of irretrievable confusion, and, ere the close of the meeting, is seized with the frightful hallucination that he is attempting the desperate feat of walking over Niagara Falls on a telegraph wire, with a twelve jar galvanic battery in full blast in his coat-tail pocket.

The mesmeric excitement gains ground with alarming rapidity, and soon becomes general ; all sorts of impromptu mesmerisers may be seen here and there
about the rooms, surrounded by. anxious and serious groups, and endeavoring, with all the earnestness of mesmeric faith, to worry suspected mediums into an
impossible sleep. It is shrewdly argued by some that a state of chronic somnolency would be an admirable mental condition in which to pass through the horrors of a protracted captivity ; and that, as by mesmeric influence, all kinds of hallucinations may be produced on the brain of the sleeper, nothing would be easier than to eat stale bread and imagine it to be sponge-cake ; to turn James River water into sparkling champagne ; and to convert into "Floating islands" the vapid juices of weak bean soup 1 These admirable results, and the startling phenomena which accompany them, however, are, unfortunately for us, not obtained ; the medium, in spite of him, cannot hear anything of the luxurious jingle of silver about his smutted tin-cup, and the same old prison-odor of superannuated bacon still clings, with anti-mesmeric tenacity, to the incorrigible vapors of the cook-house.