WHILE some of the prisoners endeavor by all sorts of ingenious stratagems to divert their minds from the ennui and monotony of captivity, others give up to their sorrows and pine away in the midst of morbid reflections and dismal forebodings. There is a pale, sallow, resurrected-looking youth whom I see wandering like an ill-fed spectre from room to room ; he has been a prisoner during many months, and is reduced to the narrowest possible limits of anatomical contraction. He has large eyes which brighten, at times, when you address him kindly or jocosely ; but they are eyes which brighten, not with intellectual sunshine, but rather with the weird radiance of moon-light.

This youth has a hobby.-That hobby is, to make his escape from the prison. He dreams of impracticable rope ladders to be manufactured surreptitiously out of blankets, and to be ingeniously concealed from the keen eye of the Inspector,-perhaps of being lowered from the windows in a basket, like Saul from the walls of Damascus. Over his soup, over his coffee, over his stewed apples, over his huckleberries, that one deep and mysterious scheme absorbs all his faculties ; at all hours that restless incubus, urged on by an enraged and merciless rider, gallops fiercely to and fro through the bewildering mazes of his brain,--especially during those periods of fearful tedium when lie gazes out through the barred windows at the green fields and forests beyond the swift waters of the James.

One stormy night he resolved to carry his long projected plan into execution, by lowering himself from one of the windows. Already his hands resolutely clutched the bars and his loot actually projected beyond the sill, when upon looking more intently at the pavement below to reassure himself before the final spring, he discovered that he was about to alight upon a Confederate hat ; now, it so happened that this hat contained a head, and that this head was an indispensable portion of the anatomy of a Confederate sentinel. The lamentable results which would have attended his descent under such adverse circumstances were sufficient to deter him from bringing about so fatal a catastrophe, and he sullenly relinquished his purpose, with a dark and secret vow, the realization of which, if more bloody and terrible than would have been a desperate encounter with a Rebel guard, will not, I dare say, be attended with the same amount of personal peril.

This morbid misanthropy assumes many different forms ; it is always melancholy, though variously expressed.

There is a gaunt, sandy-haired individual who may always be seen seated on a brick,--why on a brick, I cannot conceive-with his elbows on his knees, and his head between his hands, moaning continually from morning till night, with a pitiable expression of countenance : silent, uncommunicative, and morose. He evidently pets up his grief; I am persuaded that he loves it, and would feel provoked at any one who should cause hint to smile. They say lie is a Scotchman.

Another eccentric mortal is one whose aberrations follow an entirely different channel. This one has always a black streak somewhere on his face : no wonder,-he is continually in the cook-house, boiling, frying, or stewing something. I do not know NN-lion he eats, for I have never seen him yet that lie was not cooking : it seems to be his only solace, and his only occupation. I never pass him that some rare and pleasant odor does not greet my olfactories : sometimes of fried eggs, or onions, or nutmeg. He evidently loves to envelope himself in a perpetual atmosphere of culinary fragrances. It is, I dare say, his plan, to cook up his melancholy into all sorts of delicious concoctions, and to feed upon it in a substantial and rational manner. I am informed that he is a Frenchman.

Then there is that quiet, reserved, and portly body, who is seldom out of his corner, unless for an evening walk, and who reclines so comfortably in his capacious box-arm-chair, with a huge double-barrelled pipe in his mouth. He envelopes himself in an impenetrable atmosphere of tobacco smoke, puffing it out like a steam-engine, and smacking his lips after every discharge, as though he had just sipped of the exhilarating contents of an invisible glass of Lager. This one smokes up his melancholy ; he consumes it ; he sends it curling upward out of the prison window in huge, serpentine coils of odorous vapor ; he puffs out around him a tempestuous little firmament, in the midst of which his incandescent pipe-bowl, like an ominous sun, looms red through the infuriated swirls of stormy smoke-cloud 1 He smokes, not with ordinary gusto, but with the violence and ferocity of despair ; he must do it ; it is his only hope ; take his pipe from him, and in less than twenty-four hours he will be in a strait jacket in the Insane Asylum; suggest it to him and you will hear him reply : " Gott bewahre I Nicht um die gauze welt ! Sie ist mir lieber als das Leben !"

There is yet another : a singularly contradictory specimen of the morbid. He is constantly singing, dancing, or sleeping. His irresistible merriment wrings an echo even from the sober prison walls; lie shakes the very bars in the windows, as he leaps about in his jolly dance ; lie convulses the whole prison with his laughter. He is always ready with a song, a jig, or a joke. And yet I know he is very miserable ; I am positively sure that he is racked nearly to death with ennui, weary in mind, and sick at heart. He hails from the Emerald Isle.

There is a great outcry in the Confederacy about the exorbitant prices which have to be paid for articles of first necessity. Truly do they say :

" The question of high prices is, perhaps, the one now most urgent. How are the people-the soldiers -their wives and children to live-how is the Government to get along-with the enormous and increasing prices required for all necessaries ? This is a matter which must press upon the heart and mind of every thinking man and lover of the country. The first step towards solving the problem, is to ascertain the chief cause of this depreciation of the value of our money. Extortioners are a curse to our country. As an affair of equity, if prices must advance, all prices should advance simultaneously, and none should receive more justice in this respect than the defenders of the country.-The value of our currency is not fixed and stable, and therefore no change of wages will remedy the injustice, or meet the difficulty. The principal cause of our monetary troubles is the inflation of our currency.-Energy and wisdom in the Government alone can furnish an adequate remedy for the evils of our disordered country."

Lieutenant Skelton of the 17th Iowa, and a fellow patient, escaped yesterday from the Hospital by bribing one of the sentinels. Lieutenant Skelton had been lying in the Hospital a long time, severely wounded.

The Federal surgeons confined here since the suspension of the cartel are, at last, to be sent North. There is great rejoicing among the Faculty in view of their joyous deliverance from thralldom; we join them heartily in their self-congratulation, for there are noble fellows in the number of these ingenius menders of earthen-ware, who go once more into the field to cement together, as best they can, the human pottery cracked in the shock of armies.

The chaplains, detained on either side notwithstanding the non-combatting sanctity of their office, were sent away more than a month ago. Thus deprived of the medical advice of the one class of Doctors, and of the spiritual comfort to be derived front the other, we feel the loss to be a severe one, both to our bodies and our minds. In a social point of view we must regret their absence, however much we may philanthropically rejoice at their deliverance from this abnormal little world of ours, in which the body is always ailing and the mind is never at rest.

A number of boats laden with clothing and commissary stores from our Government are lying in the canal, fronting the prison. These are intended to relieve the needy condition of the federal prisoners here and on Belle Isle. There are also contributions from various Northern Sanitary Commissions, and other charitable Societies ; also generous donut ions from private individuals, and boxes from the families of prisoners.

A monster plan for the deliverance of all the Federal prisoners in Richmond, and for the capture and destruction of the city, has lately come to light. The plan was more or less as follows :

The officers confined in the Libby, headed by the most determined and desperate of their number, were to break out of the prison by force, overpower the sentries, and seize the arms stacked at the Headquarters of the guard on the opposite corner of the street; the prisoners on Belle Isle, and in the various prisons in Richmond, were then to be liberated, the arsenal seized, and all the insurgents armed ; the garrisons in the fortifications having been driven out, or overpowered, the city was to be held. The conspirators were to be aided by numerous Union sympathizers. The time appointed for the explosion of this insurrectionary bomb-shell was the first day of the meeting of the Rebel Congress. Jefferson Davis, and as many of the leading legislators as possible were to be secured, and sent prisoners into our lines.
This movement was to be seconded by a force of cavalry and infantry which was to make a dash upon the Rebel capital from the direction of the Peninsula.

The discovery of this huge plot might have led to serious uneasiness on the part of the Rebel Government, on the score of future attempts of the same sort ; but the fact that not only the whole plan, but even a detailed and " reliable " account, in one of our leading Northern Journals of the actual occurrence of these events, while they, as yet, existed only in the visionary minds of the conspirators, must have had the effect of setting the fears of the Rebel authorities completely at rest on the score of such future attempts ; the aforesaid newspaper, a co-conspirator, and fully informed of all the most secret plans, would, no doubt, anticipate the actual explosion, and thus afford the Confederacy ample time to guard against the emergency. The first and most vital requisite for the success of conspiracies, is secrecy : a secret, connected with a conspiracy for the capture of Richmond, and shared with a newspaper, might as well have been shared at once with Secretary Benjamin himself.

Notwithstanding the self-complacency of the Richmond authorities after the revelation of this grand conspiracy, it is a historical fact, that a few days ago, several pieces of Confederate cannon were planted near the prison so as to command the streets leaching to and from it, and that the guards have been doubled and paraded in unusual numbers before us. Whether by this display of Rebel strength and vigilance, it is intended to intimidate the most desperate, or appeal to the self preservative instincts of the more timid, I cannot say ; but, from what I see and hear around me, the vital points in question among the prisoners, just now, appear to be-the stewing of rations, and the scouring of cook-pots ; from which I gather that most of them are of opinion that, under the present unpromising circumstances, it would be far more philosophical to continue to live uncomfortably, than to attempt to die uselessly.