A gentleman, confined with him in the
Old Sugar House, used to tell his descendants that the most terrible
fight he ever engaged in was a struggle with a comrade in prison for
the carcass of a decayed rat.
It is possible that Henry Bedinger, an officer on parole in New York,
may have found some means of communicating with his young brother, and
even of supplying him, sometimes, with food. Daniel, however, was soon
put on board a prison ship, probably the Whitby, in New York harbor.
Before the first exchange was effected the poor boy had yielded to
despair, and had turned his face to the wall, to die. How bitterly he
must have regretted the home he had been so ready to leave a few
months before! And now the iron had eaten into his soul, and he longed
for death, as the only means of release from his terrible sufferings.
Daniel's father was born in Alsace, and he himself had been brought up
in a family where German was the familiar language of the
household. It seems that, in some way, probably by using his mother
tongue, he had touched the heart of one of the Hessian guards. When
the officers in charge went among the prisoners, selecting those who
were to be exchanged, they twice passed the poor boy as too far gone
to be moved. But he, with a sudden revival of hope and the desire to
live, begged and entreated the Hessian so pitifully not to leave him
behind, that that young man, who is said to have been an officer,
declared that he would be responsible for him, had him lifted and laid
down in the bottom of a boat, as he was too feeble to sit or stand.
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