him imputed the horrid crime of having received and exhibited, nine months before the arrival of Butler in the city, a cross which had been sent to him by a young friend in our army at Manassas and which it was represented was made of the bones of a Yankee soldier. No proof whatever was adduced that such exhibition had ever been made by Judge Andrews in exultation, and the cross after being received was destroyed before Butler arrived in the city. In his first interview with the authorities of the city Butler had declared that he would take no cognizance of any acts committed before he occupied the city and established martial law therein. This solemn and oft-repeated pledge he has violated in a thousand instances.

Of the other prisoners there are three captains in the Confederate service who have copies of their parole as prisoners of war and who are sent here upon no specific charge, but as suspicious persons who might break the lines and go into the Confederate service. They are Captain McLean, late of the McCulloch Rangers; Captain Losberg, who commanded the De Feriet Guards of the Chalmette Regiment, captured and paroled by Commodore Farragut in the attack upon the forts below the city, and Captain Batchelor, of the Third [First] Regiment of the Louisiana Regulars. There is also a young creole, the sole protector of his family, his father having recently died, who is sentenced to an indefinite punishment on the charge, supported by the testimony of his own slave, a negro boy, of having thrown a revolver into the river after Butler's order requiring the citizens to deliver up their arms had been published. This is the case of Mr. Le Beau, of one of the oldest and most respectable Creole families in the State. The other prisoners here are imprisoned upon like frivolous charges. Some eight or ten of them for the publication of cards denying that they had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States, their names having been published in Butler's journal among those who had taken that oath. In the case of Mr. Davidson, a gallant young lawyer who has not yet recovered from a severe wound received at Shiloh, the offense consisted in his publishing a card stating that he was not the person of the same name who was published as having taken the oath. So much for the prisoners at Ship Island, with the facts of whose cases I am personally acquainted. I refrain from any reference to my own case, hard as my doom is, closely confined on this island with all my property appropriated by the enemy and my family placed under strict espionage and subject to many annoyances, insults and discomforts. With all its trials and hardships the condition of the prisoners here is quite easy and endurable compared with that of those who are confined in the damp and unwholesome casemates of Forts Jackson and Saint Philip, on the Mississippi, and in Fort Pickens, on Santa Rosa Island. Among the latter is the mayor of the city, who has been imprisoned for four months for the offense of writing a letter to Butler protesting against his order relative to the treatment of the ladies of the city and declaring his inability to maintain the peace of the city if the Federal soldiers were thus authorized to insult and outrage our women at their own pleasure and will. The secretary of the mayor, who wrote the letter signed by the mayor, was included in the same committal and imprisonment. Several members of the council for like or smaller offenses suffer the same punishment. Doctor Porter, a wealthy dentist and citizen, is imprisoned for requiring the Citizens' Bank, the pet bank and place of deposit of Butler and his agent in his vast schemes of corruption and extortion, to pay checks in the currency which Butler alone allowed the banks to pay. George C.