"TWELVE o'clock ! Post No. 1-all's well !" suddenly breaks upon the stillness of the night.

The New Year is in !

Simultaneously a voice in the prison begins to sing The Star-Spangled Banner; it is taken up, voice after voice, until the swelling strain rises from every room in the building, and floats out upon the midnight air, and up to the starry sky, in one grand chorus of enthusiastic voices !

After this follows Auld Lang Syne.

That over, there follows such a noise of cheers, yells, clattering of tin-ware, shouts of " Happy New Year !" and such a hideous concatenation of demoniacal sounds, as might with considerable reason have been expected to frighten the new year from coming into the prison until next day.

New Year's day is spent much in the same manner as Christmas ; there are extra dinners, and a great deal of extra noise. In the evening there is a " Grand Ball" in the kitchen. The musicians are mounted on a table placed against the wall ; they discourse tolerable music from a tambourine, violin, banjo, and bones ; there is a great crowd ; with one exception, all are men-that one is a man also, but disguised into a ludicrous representation of a negro womanwell blacked up, and with a wreath of flowers on her (his) head, -this Ethiopian female is a First Lieutenant of Regulars ! The pseudo-feminine is accompanied by a comical representation of a colored beau; they are the great centre of attraction, and they open the Ball in fine style.

What a sight!-to see several hundred men dancing together at this inhuman, unnatural Ball, in the gloomy cook-room of a prison ! I say gloomy with all due deference to the weak-eyed, near-sighted, tallow-dips, which seem to understand, and to feel, the absurdity of their position, and are flickering away, and guttering down, as though making all haste to use themselves up as soon as possible.

Among these heathenish dancers, there are many, -young men of the fashionable stamp,-who whilom sported dress coats and lemon-colored kids at ceremonious parties in aristocratic parlors !

Oh, what base uses we may come to ! To think of placing one's arm around, and gracefully seizing the hand of, some rough, hairy Hoosier, or some porpoisine "gun-boat," and whirling them through that exhilarating maze, reserved only for delicious contact with slender waists and soft, white hands. O, shade of Terpsichore
When the Ball is over, the frightful serenade of the previous night is again inaugurated. Are these men mad ? What a deafening clatter of tin-ware ! What insane yells I What stamping, and leaping, and shouting ! I am informed that it is a War Dance. If so, the Sioux and Camanches are utterly outdone !

On the floor below, two sane men are near the termination of a highly interesting game of chess ; there is a great thumping and clattering of feet on the floor over-head, but it does not seem to interfere with the labor of those mental engines, whose potent energies are absorbed in the profound tactics of the chess-board ; a large circle of intelligent spectators are intent upon the next move, which must be decisive. Black's hand is outstretched, tremulous with ill-controlled excitement : White turns pale, for those nervous outstretched fingers clutch a portentous black rook, and in another instant the white king will be mated. .. . When lo ! from the ceiling overhead, where it was hung, down comes a huge ham, and drops like a bomb-shell into the very midst of the contending hosts ! The pieces are scattered right and left ; the board, and the rickety table on which it stood, are overset ; and the black and the white general both spring to their feet with a cry of horror, which is only drowned in shouts of the heartiest laughter from the bystanders. The war-dance was still going on overhead, and a gigantic Indian warrior having leaped five feet into the air, and come down directly above the suspended ham, had jarred it from the nail on which it hung, and had thus ruined the most brilliant game of chess ever played in the prison !

Much in the same style ends the celebration of the New Year's advent.

The horizon of the future is bright with rumors of "exchange;" there is a frightful epidemic of that alarming malady known as "Exchange on the brain;" some are sanguine ; most are hopeful ; and all are anxious for the arrival of that happy day of liberation which has been looked forward to so long in vain. Should the ensuing month bring with it that glorious millenium, it will not have been an empty hope which prompted us all today to wish one another " A happy New Year!"

In this prison-life of ours, so curiously interwoven are the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the humorous, that it is no easy task to separate the one from the other. There are hours of profound melancholy, and moments of reckless sans-souci.

Most of the prisoners, being soldiers only pro tem., have at variance within them two distinct elements of feeling : one springing from their habitual, and the other from their temporary mode of life ; one springs from peaceful associations with the seclusion of home, or the luxury or business activity of city life,-the other from the more recent influences of the camp and the battle-field. These incongruous elements are in constant antagonism. One moment it is the soldier, improvident of the future, reckless of the present, laughing at discomfort and privation, and merry in the midst of suffering ; then again it is the pacific citizen, complaining of misfortune, sighing for home, dreaming of seclusion and peace, yielding to despondency and to sorrow. And this is perhaps fortunate-for thus, at least, there is less danger that the prisoner shall become either a prodigal with the one element, or a miser with the other.

Most people are apt, when left continually to their own thoughts, to indulge in a sort of post-mortem examination of their previous life ; to dissect that portion of their personal history, which is seldom anatomized without arriving at the conclusion that our present misfortunes are, in nearly all cases, due to some radical error in our own record.

How many have, at some time, sighed to themselves : Alas! my life has been a failure !

Misfortune renders some men reckless ; they lash the helm-take in sail-and scud away under bare poles over the tempestuous ocean of the world. Others, on the contrary, become cautious through adversity and wise through failure, and such, retracing in their leisure hours their path of life, go back and question the sorrowful spectres of perished hopes, which haunt the crowded grave-yards of the past ; they draw from its cerements the cold, wan reality of by-gone years ; they cut into the body of their blighted, dead past-life, and seek to learn of what disease it died. This is rational,-it is instructive, it is courageous ; unfortunately, it is not agreeable. Much pleasanter it is, amid the platitudes of our daily existence, to lean toward the amenities, rather than the duties, of thought. Better, we deem, to light anew about the corpse of the dead Past the halo of a specious existence ; to enwreathe the torn hair with blossoms,-to tinge the livid cheek with the purple flush of health,-to enkindle the glazed eyes with eloquent lustre,-to breathe into the pallid lips the wonted echoes of a familiar voice which may discourse to us pleasantly of long departed joys, and of old, happy hours. There is indeed, a sort of piteous consolation in doing this ; it is like the mournful solace sought by those who, having lost some being near and clear to them, love to plant the honored grave with flowers.

It is this inward self which is all his own, that the prison-leisure leads the speculative captive to dissect and to analyze. He is allowed ample time for thought. After a long voyage with memory over the ocean of the past, lie returns to the present with a better heart, and endeavors from the new-kindled stars which have risen above the vapory horizon of his prison-life, to cast the horoscope of a wiser future. He has held his post-mortem examination, and in all likelihood, has not failed to discover the nature of the disease.

Prisons, like death-beds, are fertile in repentances ; like the regions of Avernus they are paved with good resolutions : fortunately they neither resemble the former in their brevity of duration, nor the latter in their eternity of time,-so that the prison-repentance ,may be genuine if enduring, and the good resolves fruitful of good if unbroken. It is, indeed, a pity that the fair promises we make to ourselves in captivity, are so apt to be cast aside unfulfilled when we are once free.
But the hour of retrospect and self-humiliation must come for all, sooner or later. Even the scoffer who has journeyed over the path of a long life with his back to Heaven, will turn, as he dies, and take one step towards it !
Glorious and beautiful is the Shakespearean philosophy which teaches us to see good in everything ; verily, there are books in the prison bars-and sermons in the prison stones.

Every afternoon I notice in the street, beneath my window, a group of ill-clad juvenile beggars, of both sexes. They hold up their red little hands to us, as they stand there shivering in the cold. We throw to them spare fragments of corn bread, and occasionally a macerated ham bone, which they scramble for greedily, to carry home with them.

There is a loyal, patriotic, and attenuated old cow, who also comes regularly every day to munch at the edible bits and scraps thrown out to her from our windows. When she fails to attract our attention, she shakes her head impatiently, and jingles the bell at her neck, gazing wistfully up at the barred windows.

So it is: these children, who are innocent and hungry-this poor beast, who is neglected and starved -these are the only inhabitants of the Confederate Capital, who dare openly to acknowledge their misery, and to show their attachment to the Yankee barbarians, who, wretched and hungry enough themselves, Heaven knows I are yet ready to share even with them the meagre rations on which they are compelled to subsist.

The extinction of the last hope of an exchange of prisoners-at least within a reasonable time, has had the effect of depressing our spirits to an extent truly deplorable. The usual games and pastimes are abandoned ; even those villainous nocturnal catechizers, generally impervious to the most grievous calamities, have sunk into a condition of despondency which would be almost gratifying, were it only limited to their own number.

To add to this doleful aspect of affairs, no boxes from home have been distributed among us for several weeks,-so that the majority of us are subsisting chiefly on corn cake, tobacco smoke, and the recollections of former prosperity,--the latter, a species of retrospective diet which makes a capital bonne boucle for a post-prandial chit-chat under straitened circumstances, but which, unfortunately, is not possessed of very nutritious qualities. Hence, we are daily becoming more and more depressed, physically as well as mentally,-a depression, which if not checked in its alarming rapidity, will before long bring about a state of collapse, and will probably lead to a series of " special exchanges " into the lines of that bourne from which no Libby traveller ever returns.

I must admit that it requires a great deal of that kind of philosophical sang froid so characteristic of the nobles during the French Revolution, who joked and laughed in the tumbrils which conveyed them to the guillotine, to treat so serious a calamity in a manner so trivial. But, as I have been solicited by my fellow-prisoners to compose a readable book of our prison experiences, and as I am inclined to believe that the few who will ever get out of this modern Bastile (there is, in parenthesis, a strong anatomical probability, at present, that the author himself will never get out to publish it,) will be like all men who have been prisoners, and like many philosophers who have not, that is-disposed to laugh, rather than to weep over departed evils, I, therefore, take it for granted that I am pursuing the course most in accordance with their wishes. It has been wisely suggested that " To be great, is to be unhappy!" Oh if it be requisite to lift one's mental energies from
the stagnating platitudes of prison existence, up to the empyreal sublimities of authorship,-if it be necessary to struggle through the torpid vapors of a lugubrious " stale, flat and unprofitable " life, up to the dignities and responsibilities of literary composition,-if Rabelais did not express the truth when he asserted that a body emasculated by famine, and tortured by disease and privation, is incapable of furnishing the intellect which tenants it, with noble and excellent thoughts ; if it be absolutely essential to laugh when one feels like crying,-to smile when one would frown,-to write, when one is languid and torpid, on meagre fragments of unsized paper, mutilated fly-leaves of books, and greasy covers of cheap publications, with a fork-pointed pen,-to answer rollcall precisely at the culminating period of a pathetic and intricate passage,-to hasten down to the kitchen in order to concoct an indigestible dinner, and to have your pot boiling over on the stove and your very best ideas boiling over in your brain,-to have hickory brooms inserted unceremoniously between your literary legs at sweeping hours, and the floor washed, and filthy water dashed about in insane and perilous cataracts under your literary nose, on scrubbing days,-if, I groan, it be requisite to endure all this, pending the composition of a readable book of prison experiences,-Oh, then, that this wise saying might be for once reversed, and that it might prove equally true that " To be unhappy, is to be great !"

But to return : Seven mortal clays and nights with nothing to eat but stale corn cake, and nothing to drink but cold hydrant water, would, I dare say, have made one of those Revolutionary aristocrats as brisk as a grass-hopper and as merry as a cricket ! The result, in our case, is by no means so gratifying ; for, our prison presents, just now, not so much the lively prospect of a clover field as of some antiquated museum, in which a rare collection of Egyptian mummies might, by means of a necromantic spell, have been suddenly recalled into existence.

I could not repress a ghastly smile this morning as I sat observing a mess of four, whose breakfast consisted simply of a very small quantity of very weak coffee, and who, with all the gravity of Puritans, employed the time they would, under more favorable circumstances have devoted to eating, in singing " Glory, glory hallelujah !"
Except during the first three weeks following our arrival here, we have never been reduced to so wretched a condition, with regard to provisions, as we are at present. Empty shelves and empty boxes, meet the eye every where ; the pegs which whilom displayed juicy hams and savory tongues, now support only their meagre carcasses, which look, as they pend there, like the shrivelled remains of so many vile criminals hung for piracy.

It is a well-known fact, that those who perish from starvation behold, amid their expiring agonies, visions of superb banquets, tables loaded with the most succulent viands and the choicest and most delicious confections, which, Tantalus-like, they may gaze upon, but cannot reach. I know not if what we are experiencing of the same sort at present, be a premonitory symptom-but it certainly is the prevailing affliction among us. Ah, yes ! Miss Leslie's Cookery Book reads like a novel !

This month has been among the most eventful of our prison history.

Its advent was made joyful by the unusually promising aspect of the exchange question, and although the sanguine hopes entertained of its speedy adjustment, and our liberation, were doomed to experience a sudden and unexpected demise, leaving us more gloomy and disheartened than ever, yet, its exit has been attended -by a thrill of excitement so unusual as to be almost unprecedented.

The Libby has been, I believe, always considered the safest military prison in the Confederacy; its isolated position, and the vigilance of its commanding officer; Major Turner, having entitled it to high encomiums in this regard. If it be true that love laughs at bolts, when its object is a woman--captivity, unfortunately, cannot always indulge its risibility at the expense of bars, even though its object be libertyone quite as worthy of the affections. A prisoner, if he deserve the name, is always more or less occupied with the idea of making his escape ; he becomes a plotter, in spite of his scruples ; he forms a thousand plans in his mind, all of which begin by appearing more feasible, and almost invariably end by being considered more impossible, than they really are ; the strength and resistance of bars are accurately calculated ; the pregnability of walls cautiously and satisfactorily tested; the elevation of windows from the street shrewdly estimated ; the vigilance or carelessness of sentries cautiously observed, and their peculiar habits and propensities systematically analyzed. All these preliminary facts having been properly weighed in the balance, the plan is matured, and the opportunity for carrying it into effect is patiently awaited. But, as it happens with those schemes in life, which depend for their success more upon accidental and fortuitous contingencies than upon natural and preconceived events, that very opportunity which is the last requisite on the list calculated upon by the schemist, is also the chief one in importance. Without it the shrewdest and best matured plans are destined to fail. Opportunities have changed, at times, the destinies of whole nations.

It happens that the prisoner seldom finds an opportunity ready for him when he could take advantage of it, and quite often it presents itself when he cannot. Now, some officers in the Libby having, notwithstanding the vigilant eye of Major Turner and the fidelity of his guards, discovered some flaws in his precautions for the safe-keeping of his prisoners, arranged their plans accordingly-they were ready for the opportunity precisely at the critical moment when it was ready for them, and five in number, they coolly walked out of the prison one fine afternoon. The first flaw was this : that visitors, mostly citizens of Richmond, were permitted to enter the prison and to leave it without being challenged by the sentries. The next flaw was, that when the invalid officers attended "sick call," every morning, they passed through the same door on their way to the doctor's office, through which these visitors passed in and out unmolested. It was no difficult matter for them to attire themselves in citizen's clothing, or like workmen, or Rebel soldiers, and to avail themselves of this door as a means of exit, not toward the doctor's office, but up the nearest street into the city.

Had not this successful trick been discovered in time, no doubt every man in the prison would have eventually converted himself pro tem. into a fine old Virginia gentleman, or belligerent Butternut, acid some pleasant morning the visitors who walked out of it would have been far more numerous than the visitors who walked into it. The consummate impudence of this trick was its most admirable feature,indeed, it was the true key to its success.

These escapes have been productive of much merriment in the prison, and of joy at the liberation of these, our quondam fellow-sufferers. To be sure, they have still to reach the Federal lines in safety, an undertaking by no means easy, when we consider that the whole Confederacy is indeed a sort of huge Military Penitentiary.*

Two more of our number have been sent to Saulsbury, North Carolina, to remain at hard labor during the war, carrying a ball and chain. This is also done upon the plea of retaliation. They are Captain Ives, 10th Massachusetts, and Captain J. E. B. Reed, 51st Indiana.

Belle Isle, where some 6,000 Federal prisoners, enlisted men, are confined, is beautifully situated in a bend of the James River, about half a mile above Richmond. In the summer season, it is a delightful spot, and was much frequented, previous to its use as a prison, by pic-nic and other pleasure parties from the city.
The river, which is here very swift of current and broken into innumerable cascades, is full of fantastic groups of rocks, and islets covered with luxuriant foliage, among which it dashes, white with sparkling foam.

The island, which contains some thirty or forty acres of superficial extent, rises, at the lower extremity into a gentle, sandy elevation : upon this is situated the camp for prisoners, occupying a space of about four acres. The upper extremity of the Island is bold and precipitous, rising abruptly into a rocky bluff, crowned by an earth-work which commands the river up-stream.

The view both up and down the river, from the summit of this bluff, is very fine. Looking up-stream the river is seen winding down between hilly banks of cultivated land and luxuriant foliage, its numberless little cascades flashing among the rock-islets ; on the right bank are some earthworks commanding the approaches to Richmond in that direction ; on the left bank is the cemetery, where the tomb of President Monroe is just discovered among the pines, and below, on the edge of the river are the Water Works which supply the city.

Looking from the bluff down-stream you have a full view of Richmond, with the Capital crowning the highest eminence ; on its left the State Penitentiary with its castellated turrets ; below it the Tredegar Works, and on your extreme right, Manchester, a village opposite Richmond, on the right bank of the James.

Between Belle Isle and the city, three long bridges span the river, almost shrouded in the rich foliage of the banks and of numerous picturesque islets.

Immediately below you, is the prisoners' camp, divided into two sections, each surrounded by a ditch and breastwork,-looking like a crowded, walled, little city of Sibley tents ; at the very extremity of the point is a leaning flag-staff from which float the white field and red cross of Rebeldom ; on the right bank of the islands are a few brick and frame houses, the only buildings on it ; on the left of you, at the foot of the bluff, is the prisoners' grave-yard. This graveyard contains ninety-seven graves ; at the head of each is a wooden head-board neatly lettered, with the name, rank, and regiment, and date of decease of the occupant. The oldest grave dates back to June, 1863. The day upon which most deaths occurred was the 5th of January, 1864, on which day four new graves were added.** The grave-yard is located on a slightly elevated bank, close to the edge of the river, which as it rushes past among the rocks, ceaselessly chaunts a mournful requiem over the hapless tenants of that lonely spot.

Lieutenant Bossieux, a Virginian, is in command at Belle Isle : he is a humane and courteous officer.

The sufferings of the Federal prisoners on Belle Isle are severe indeed. The rigors of an unusually cold winter, and the precarious and meagre commissariat of the Confederacy, have at times rendered these sufferings terrible in the extreme. I have been assured by the prisoners themselves that the commanding officer has ever done all in his power to render their imprisonment supportable.

There is a bakery on the island for the use of the prisoners and garrison, as also a sutler.

Many attempts to escape, some of them successful, have been made at different tinges by the prisoners. Among the graves in the lonely little graveyard, is one which shows by the inscription on the headboard, that its tenant was drowned while attempting to swim across the river to the opposite shore ; having one day managed to elude the vigilance of the guard, he had secreted himself until night, when he endeavored to swim the stream, but was drowned among its whirls and eddies. His lifeless body was discovered on the following day, caught in a fish-trap in which it had become entangled.

The small-pox has broken out among us. Here and at Belle Isle its ravages have been much mitigated, but at Danville it has made frightful havoc among the Federal prisoners, hundreds having been already carted (I use the Rebel expression) to the grave-yards, and it is probable. that many more, both there and here, are destined to fall victims to this loathsome and pestilential malady. This frightful accessory alone was needed to complete the sadness of a picture already gloomy and repulsive enough.

But these horrors have not been endured by men alone. Lately, a woman disguised as a soldier, was discovered among the prisoners on Belle Isle. She had for more than a month endured the terrors of a situation which needs no comment, and had preserved her incognito unsuspected until compelled by sickness to repair to the hospital, where she confessed her true sex. She is a young girl of seventeen or eighteen years of • age, of prepossessing appearance, and modest and reserved demeanor. She persistently refused to throw any light upon her previous history, or to reveal the motive which had induced her to adopt the garb and the calling of a soldier. She had served during more than a year in a cavalry regiment in the West, when made a prisoner. She had probably followed to the field some patriotic lover, or adventurous spouse. When these facts became known to us in the Libby, a sum was at once contributed by the ofñcers, sufficient to purchase the female soldier garments suitable to her sex, wherewith she might present a more becoming appearance on her return to the Union lines.
 

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* Captain J. F. Porter is the only one who has succeeded in reaching the Union lines. Major Bates, 80th Illinois, Lieutenant King, 3d Ohio, Lieutenant Cupp, 167th Pennsylvania, and Lieutenant Carothers, 3d Ohio, have been recaptured.
** This refers to deaths which occurred on the island,-the sick were regularly sent to the hospitals in Richmond.