My small weak hand would waver But he stands steady in the ranks, The battle-ground to see; But his is strong in freedom's might, He fights for her and me. I am watching and waiting, As mothers watch and wait, Whose sons are in the army now, And it is growing late. My life's past its morning, It's near sunset in the sky Oh! I long once more to clasp him In my arms before I die. Yet farther off the army goes- And he, my boy, my darling, The pride of my old heart! Shall we meet in fond embrace. Above the hero write, The young, half-sainted: His country asked his life, His life he gave. THE TRUE FLAG OF PEACE. The battle is ended, the cannon is still, The smoke of the battle is yet in the sky, For fame do I fight? Lord of hosts, does not he Held in honor by angels. Alike in thy sight The poorest who carves for the red stripes their stain, And the leader who falls in the van of the fight. They are coming-they come! Shifting sunbeams reveal Their way through the leaves by the glitter of steel; They swarm to the light, through the tree-boles they swarm Out from the forest aisles, lofty and large. Our Colonel turns pale, drops his beckoning arms, But hark, boys, the order: "Fix bayonetscharge!" THE EAGLE OF THE EIGHTH WISCONSIN. Poised in the azure depths of air, Like one, just brought in being there, And whose flight had not begun— And he knew not whether his home to seek In that dazzling world of light, Or glide far down to some snowy peak Of bleak Nevadian height— An eagle's slowly moving wing Lingered between the sun And a boy, whose right arm clasped a maid, And the proud bird's shadow nerved his heart, The roll of the stirring drum came clear, No longer the eagle in eyrie rests, But his straining flight doth keep, As he follows the train o'er the sounding plain, "Come, now for a shot at him. Who's afraid But the boy on whose right had leaned the maid And would'st take the life we are fighting for, Till one morn he sat on the ridge of the tent, No more, whose right arm clasped a maid, And no more the eagle's shadow played He folded his heavy wings, and slept Do you wonder that soon as the soldier stirred On his shoulder perched the fierce, grim bird, And when, once more, he proudly marched And on their ranks the foemen close, Till their blood and their banners stream In mass confused and mingled flow, Its terrible whistling song of woe, And the hiss of the shells that scream, And the roar of the fierce artillery, As if the Genius of the Free And answer with shout and cheer, Thus from the banks of far Osage, And Vicksburgh's thundering roar- As State by State the foemen yield, The Eighth Wisconsin marches on, By danger undeterred, A correspondent of the Iroqua (Wis.) Times gives the following, among other particulars, relative to the eagle of the Eighth Wisconsin regiment, which the soldiers have named "Old Abe:" "When the regiment is engaged in battle, Old Abe manifests the fiercest delight. At such a time he will always be found in his appropriate place, at the head of company D. To be seen in all his glory, he should be seen when the regiment is envel oped in the smoke of battle. Then the eagle, with spread pinions, jumps up and down on his perch, uttering such wild, fearful screams as an eagle alone can utter. The fiercer, wilder, and louder the storm of battle, the fiercer, wilder, and louder the scream of the eagle. Twice Old Abe has been hit by secession bullets; one shot carried away a third part of his tail-feathers. He is a universal favorite, and has been carried with the regiment through seven States. Thousands flock to see him, i and he is fast becoming famous," And one of them bears on his right a gun, And his dream by night is a vision sweet, Where he meets with his first and last retreat, THE BLUE COAT. The following ballad is from the pen of Bishop Burgess, of Maine, and was contributed by him to the book published and sold at the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, under the sanction of the State Fair Association of the women of Maryland: THE BLUE COAT OF THE SOLDIER. You asked me, little one, why I bowed, The blue great-coat, the sky-blue coat, I knew not, I, what weapon he chose, His country's blue great-coat he wore. Perhaps he was born in a forest hut, Perhaps he had danced on a palace-floor; The blue great-coat, etc. It mattered not much if he drew his line He might have no skill to read or write, Than the blue great-coat, etc. It may be he could plunder and prowl, On the honored coat he bravely wore. He had worn it long, and borne it far; When hardy Butler reined his steed Marched he who yonder blue coat wore. Perhaps it was seen in Burnside's ranks, Or with Kearny and Pope 'mid the steelly storm, Or when right over, as Jackson dashed, Or when far ahead Antietam flashed, He flung to the ground the coat that he wore. Or stood at Gettysburgh, where the graves That garb of honor tells enough, Though I its story guess no more; The heart it covers is made of such stuff, He may hang it up when the peace shall come, And so, my child, will you and I, For whose fair home their blood they pour, The blue great-coat, the sky-blue coat, REBEL PRISONERS IN OHIO.-The following account of the treatment of rebel prisoners in the Ohio Penitentiary was given in the Richmond Examiner of March seventeenth, 1864: The experiences of this war have afforded many examples of Yankee cruelty which have produced an impression more or less distinct upon the enlightened portions of the world. But the statement which we proceed to give, takes precedence of all that has ever yet been narrated of the atrocities of the enemy; and it is so remarkable, both on account of its matter and the credit that must naturally attach to its authorship, that we doubt whether the so-called civilized world of this generation has produced anywhere any well-authenticated story of equal horror. The statement we give to our readers is that we have just taken from the lips of Captain Calvin C. Morgan, a brother of the famous General Morgan, who arrived in Richmond under the recent flag of truce, which covered the return of several hundred of our prisoners. Captain Morgan was among those of his brother's expedition who, in last July, were incarcerated in the Penitentiary of Ohio. On entering this infamous abode, Captain Morgan and his companions were stripped in a reception-room and their naked bodies examined there. They were again stripped in the interior of the prison, and washed in tubs by negro convicts; their hair cut close to the scalp, the brutal warden, who was standing by, exhorting the negro barber to "cut off every dd lock of their rebel hair." After these ceremonies, the officers were locked up in cells, the dimensions of which were thirty-eight inches in width, six and a half feet in length, and about the same in height. In these narrow abodes our brave soldiers were left to pine, branded as felons, goaded by "convict-drivers," and insulted by speeches which constantly reminded them of the weak and cruel neglect of that government, on whose behalf, after imperilling their lives, they were now suffering a fate worse than death. But even these sufferings were nothing to what was reserved for them in another invention of cruelty without a parallel, unless in the secrets of the infernal. said they had already been taxed to the point of death. The wretch replied: "They did not talk right yet." He wished them to humble themselves to him. He went into the cell of one of them, Major Webber, to taunt him. "Sir," said the officer, "I defy you. You can kill me, but you can add nothing to the sufferings you have already inflicted. Proceed to kill me; it makes not the slightest difference." It appears that after General Morgan's escape, suspicion alighted on the warden, a certain Captain Merion, who, it was thought, might have been corrupted. To alleviate the suspicion, (for which there were really no grounds whatever,) the brute commenced a system of devilish persecution of the unfortunate confederate prisoners who remained in his hands. One part of the system was solitary confinement in dungeons. These dungeons were close cells, a false door being drawn over the grating so as to exclude light and air. The food allowed the occupants of these dark and noisomea ravenous desire for food. places was three ounces of bread and half a pint of water per day. The four walls were bare of every thing but a water-bucket, for the necessities of nature, which was left for days to poison the air the prisoner breathed. He was denied a blanket; deprived of his overcoat, if he had one, and left standing or stretched with four dark, cold walls around him, with not room enough to walk in to keep up the circulation of his blood, stagnated with the cold, and the silent and unutterable horrors of his abode. Confinement in these dungeons was the warden's sentence for the most trivial offences. On one occasion, one of our prisoners was thus immured because he refused to tell Merion which one of his companions had whistled, contrary to the prison rules. But the most terrible visitation of this demon's displeasure occurred not more than six weeks ago. Some knives had been discovered in the prisoner's cells, and Merion accused the occupants of meditating their escape. Seven of them, all officers, and among them Captain Morgan, were taken to the west end of the building and put in the dark cells there. They were not allowed a blanket or overcoat, and the thermometer was below zero. There was no room to pace. Each prisoner had to struggle for life, as the cold benumbed him, by stamping his feet, beating the walls, now catching a few minutes of horrible sleep on the cold floor, and then starting up to continue, in the dark, his wrestle for life. "I had been suffering from heart-disease," says Captain Morgan. "It was terribly aggravated by the cold and horror of the dungeon in which I was placed. I had a wet towel, one end of which I pressed to my side; the other would freeze, and I had to put its frozen folds on my naked skin. I stood this way all night, pressing the frozen towel to my side, and keeping my feet going up and down. I felt I was struggling for my life." Captain Morgan endured this confinement for eighteen hours, and was taken out barely alive. The other prisoners endured it for sixteen days and nights. In this time they were visited at different periods by the physician of the penitentiary-Dr. Loring-who felt their pulses and examined their conditions, to ascertain how long life might hold out under the exacting| torture. It was awful, this ceremony of torture, this medical examination of the victims. The tramp of the prisoners' feet up and down, (there was no room to walk,) as they thus worked for life, was incessantly going on. This black tread-mill of the dungeon could be heard all through the cold and dreary hours of the night. Dr. Loring, who was comparatively a humane person, besought Merion to release the unhappy men; At the expiration of sixteen days the men were released from the dungeons. Merion said “he would take them out this time alive, but the next time they offended they would be taken out feet foremost." Their appearance was frightful; they could no longer be recognized by their companions. With their bodies swollen and discolored, with their minds bordering on childishness, tottering, some of them talking foolishly, these wretched men seemed to agree but in one thing "I had known Captain Coles," says Captain Moras well as my brother. When he came out of his dungeon, I swear to you I did not know him. His face had swollen to two or three times its ordinary size, and he tottered so that I had to catch him from falling. Captain Barton was in an awful state. His face was swollen, and the blood was bursting from the skin. All of them had to be watched, so as to check them in eating, as they had been starved so long." gan, Captain Morgan was so fortunate as to obtain a transfer to Johnson's Island, whence, after being carried to Point Lookout, he was exchanged. He says that when he got into Beast Butler's hands, he felt as if he had been translated to Paradise"-showing what comparative things misery and happiness are in this world. But he left in those black walls of captivity he had been released from, sixty-five brave men, who are wearing their lives away without even a small whisper of relief from that government for which they are martyrs. Is there any authority in Richmond that will crook a thumb to save these men, who are not only flesh of our flesh, but the defenders of those in this capital, who, not exactly disowning them, undertake the base and cowardly pretence of ignoring their fate? What is the confederate definition of "retaliation"? Captain Morgan says that on his way down the bay, to Fortress Monroe, he met Colonel Streight; that this famous "hostage "" was fat and rubicund; that he spoke freely of his prison experience in Richmond, and complained only that he had to eat corn-bread. This appeared to be the extent of his sufferings, and the confederate limit of retaliation. Is it necessary to present the contrast further than we have already done, by a relation of facts at once more truthful and more terrible than any argument or declamation could possibly be? COLONEL MOSBY OUTWITTED. Colonel Mosby, the guerrilla chief, has become famous, and his dashing exploits are often recorded to our disadvantage; but even he meets with his match occasionally. On Friday, March twenty-fifth, 1865, Captain E. B. Gere, of the Griswold Light Cavalry, was sent out with one hundred and twenty-five men to the neighborhoods of Berryville and Winchester on a scout, and encamped at Millwood, some six or eight miles from the former place. After the men had got their fires built, Sergeant Weatherby, of company B, Corporal Simpson, of company II, and a private, went some two miles from |