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New Zealand Herald, Volume I, Issue 268, 21 September 1864, Page 3

Punishment in the Kedeual Camp.—" Close to General Meade's head-quarters, I saw, up to fivo o'clock in the afternoon, numbers of prisoners, men belonging to the Federal .army, engaged ill loathsome and degrading tasks. The clean and well appointed Lhain gang at Havanna, who have the Presidio every morning to go through a little light work in street sweeping, were infinitely tetter off than these wretches. X saw one miserable object, dirty, haggard, and blood-shot eyed—a week's mud, a fortnight's dirt, and a month's beard upon him; his kept tied over his head with a foul clout, his feet swathed in bandages, and his body robed in the usual blue grey overcoat, but inconceivably rugged and stained—who was kept by two soldiers with fixed bayonets, continually sweeping, There is a little dry ground about the quarters of the General-in-Chief, and a plank road had been laid over the mud from the principal tents to the main guard-house. The man with the clout round liis head had been in the hands of the tormentors —so a friend who had been watching him told m<j —since early that morning. Tho sentries had relieved each other over and over again, but for him there had been no surcease. First, they forced him to make from tangled brushwood his own broom, bind the twigs together, and shape and fit a stick for them ; and then tlifcy gently pricked him onwards with their bayonets—sometimes porliaps not very gently—the while he swept. The Abracadabra potency of the goad was in them, and he, poor devil! was bound to sweep. I see him now tattered and torn, ;md foul, his back bent, his knotted-veined hands clutching the besom, and ever and anon turning his head, and with blear eyes, and tho rheum of exhaustion on his hairy muzzle, glaring at the tormentors, as though to say, ' Whither next, damn you Besides the sweeping, they had been putting iun\ to all kinds of sorry uses during the (Lay, making him roll barrels full of ordure, clean out stables worse than Augean, and tho like ; I wondered when I saw him glare over his shoulder at the tormentors, that ho did not pluck up heart of grace, and at least essay to knock one of them over with his broomstick. He could but have been bayonetted on the spot, or shot a. few hours afterwards by sentence of drum-head court-martial, and that scrape would not have been much worse. I take it, than the one he was in already. I dare say he was a craven hound. I don't know what he had done, but it was doubtless something very henious and very mean. A shabby-rogue—one of Sir John FalstatTs Coventry men, who had stolen linen oil' a hedge—only here there were no hedges, and no linen to tako off them. There was nothing but mud to steal, and that is a commodity scarcely marketable. There were some signs of shame, however, about this most forlorn rascal. The English ladies who were of our party wereyoungand comely, and as tin* Amazons rode up, the luckless gaol-bird •liadu a dash at the hood of and strive to* hide his head within its folds, iiut tho tormentors were at him again and he had to go on sweeping— , n, on, like tho Wandering Jew."—Letter from Mr. !-'aia, in the Tdajraph. He that studies revenge keeps his own wounds "l'een and rankling. " MoT x<) von riiosi'ECTirs ok joint-stock company. ' 'Ihe earth hath bubble as the water hatli And this is of them."