Pete Bates, of the Third Michigan, who was the wag of our squad, accounted for Smith's condition by saying that while on dress parade once the Colonel of Smith's regiment had commanded "eyes right," and then forgot to give the order "front." Smith, being a good soldier, had kept his eyes in the position of gazing at the buttons of the third man to the right, waiting for the order to restore them to their natural direction, until they had become permanently fixed in their obliquity and he was compelled to go through life taking a biased view of all things.
Smith walked in, made a diagonal survey of the encampment, which, if he had ever seen "Mitchell's Geography," probably reminded him of the picture of a Kaffir village, in that instructive but awfully dull book, and then expressed the opinion that usually welled up to every Rebel's lips: "Well, I'll be durned, if you Yanks don't just beat the devil." Of course, we replied with the well-worn prison joke, that we supposed we did, as we beat the Rebels, who were worse than the devil.
There rode in among us, a few days after our arrival, an old man whose collar bore the wreathed stars of a Major General.

Heavy white locks fell from beneath his slouched hat, nearly to his shoulders.

Sunken gray eyes, too dull and cold to light up, marked a hard, stony face, the salient feature of which was a thin-upped, compressed mouth, with corners drawn down deeply--the mouth which seems the world over to be the index of selfish, cruel, sulky malignance.

It is such a mouth as has the school-boy--the coward of the play ground, who delights in pulling off the wings of flies.

It is such a mouth as we can imagine some remorseless inquisitor to have had--that is, not an inquisitor filled with holy zeal for what he mistakenly thought the cause of Christ demanded, but a spleeny, envious, rancorous shaveling, who tortured men from hatred of their superiority to him, and sheer love of inflicting pain.
The rider was John H.Winder, Commissary General of Prisoners, Baltimorean renegade and the malign genius to whose account should be charged the deaths of more gallant men than all the inquisitors of the world ever slew by the less dreadful rack and wheel.