she made haste to go below. "Now my friends in New York," continued she, "had given me a supply of medicines, for we had few such things in Dixie, and among the remedies were quinine and brandy. I hastily took a flask of brandy, and we went below, where we were led to the rude stalls provided for cattle, but now crowded with poor human wretches. There in that horrible place dear Sidney Lanier lay wrapped in an old quilt, his thin hands tightly clinched, his face drawn and pinched, his eyes fixed and staring, his poor body shivering now and then in a spasm of pain. Lilla fell at his side, kissing him and calling: Brother Sid, don't you know me? Don't you know your little sister?' But no recognition or response came from the sunken eyes. I poured some brandy into a spoon and gave it to him. It gurgled down his throat at first with no effort from him to

swallow it. I repeated the stimulant several times before he finally revived. At last he turned his eyes slowly about until he saw Lilla, and murmured: 'Am I dead? Is this Lilla? Is this heaven?'

To make a long story short, the colonel assisted us to get him above to our cabin. I can see his fellowprisoners now as they crouched and assisted to pass him along over their heads, for they were so packed that they could not make room to carry him through. Along over their heads they tenderly passed the poor, emaciated body, so shrunken with prison life and benumbed with cold. We got him into clean blankets, but at first he could not endure the pain from the fire, he was so nearly frozen. We gave him some hot soup and more brandy, and he lay quiet till after midnight. Then he asked for his flute and began playing. As he played the first few notes, you should have heard

the yell of joy that came up from the shivering wretches down below, who knew that their comrade was alive. And there we sat entranced about him, the colonel and his wife, Lilla and I, weeping at the tender music, as the tones of new warmth and color and hope came like liquid melody from his magic flute."

In this enfeebled condition he was landed in February, 1865, and as soon as the exchange was effected he set out on foot for his far-away Georgia home. A twenty-dollar gold piece, which he had in his pocket when captured-doubtless the small sum kept by him when the English cap. tain of the "Annie," just before capture, directed him to distribute the ship's money among the crew, and an old tar having been overlooked, Lanier gave him all his share but

this and which was returned to him when released-and the friend-making, comfort-earning flute were his sole possessions. Weary and foot

sore, he plodded along till March 15, when he reached home utterly exhausted in strength. The hardships of camp and prison life, the bitter cold at sea, and the long, weary journey had proved too much for his constitution, and six weeks of desperate illness was the result. The first days of his recovery witnessed the death of his mother from consumption, and he himself arose from his sick bed with pronounced congestion of one lung. Such, however was the elasticity of his nature -a quality for which he was ever remarkable-that two months with an uncle at Point Clear, on Mobile Bay, where he lived for the most part out of doors and breathed the invigorating, life-giving air of pines and of sea, brought the necessary relief.

Later in life Mr. Lanier wrote to Bayard Taylor: "Perhaps you know that with us of the younger generation in the South, since the

In

war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying." Doubtless he had in mind the years of his life between 1865 and 1873. September, 1865, he writes, amid the uncongenial atmosphere of the schoolroom in a private family: "I'm busy with brain since I wrote you. Have little leisure.

Thirty classes a day. and failing health prevents sitting up late at night. It almost maddens me to be confined to the horrible monotony of tare and tret (it should be swear and fret) when my brain is fairly teeming with beautiful things."

In December of the same year this servitude was exchanged for a clerkship in a hotel in Montgomery, Ala., whose prosaic duties he discharged till April, 1867, when, having brought to completion his first book, a novel entitled "Tiger Lilies," he made, the following month, his first visit to New York City in search of