Ecce Amaritudo Mea Amarissima.
We were frightened by the report that a gang of red-coats were sinking
a large pit in the Camp.
"Are they going to bury us alive without any flogging? That's not half
so merciful as Haynau's rule in Austria;" was my observation to a mate
prisoner--a shrewd Irishman.
"Where did you read in history that the British Lion was ever merciful
to a fallen foe?" was his sorrowfully earnest reply.
Oh! days and nights of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th of December, 1854,
your remembrance will not end, no, not even in my grave.
They were happy days in my youth, when I thought with Rousseau, that
the heart of man is from nature good. It was a sad fatality now that
compelled me to feel the truth from the prophet Isaiah, that the heart
of man is desperately wicked.
I was really thunderstruck at the savage eagerness with which spies and
red-coats sprang out of their ranks to point me out. Though a British
soldier was not ashamed to swear and confess his cowardice of running away
from before my pike, which I never had on the stockade, where the fellow
never could have seen me; I shall not prostitute my intelligence and
comment on the 'evidence' against me from a gang of bloodthirsty mercenary
spies. The printer will copy my trial from the public newspaper,
'The Age'.