Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features growing cordial.  Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly excused his reception of me.  The day before, as he told me, he had dismissed from the service a medical man hailing from ——­, Pennsylvania, bearing my last name, preceded by the same two initials; and he supposed, when my card came up, it was this individual who was disturbing his slumbers.  The coincidence was so unlikely a priori, unless some forlorn parent without antecedents had named a child after me, that I could not help cross-questioning the Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact was just as he had said, even to the somewhat unusual initials.  Dr. Wilson very kindly furnished me all the information in his power, gave me directions for telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every disposition to serve me.

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old gentleman in a very happy state.  He had just discovered his son, in a comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel.  He thought that he could probably give us some information which would prove interesting.  To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in company with our kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see me as happy as himself.  He went up-stairs to his son’s chamber, and presently came down to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P——­, of the Pennsylvania ——­th, was a very fresh, bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent injury received in action.  A grape-shot, after passing through a post and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not penetrating or breaking.  He had good news for me.

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through Harrisburg, going East.  He had conversed in the bar-room of this hotel with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder, (it might be the lower part of the neck,) and had his arm in a sling.  He belonged to the Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that he was a Captain, by the two bars on his shoulder-strap.  His name was my family-name; he was tall and youthful, like my Captain.  At four o’clock he left in the train for Philadelphia.  Closely questioned, the Lieutenant’s evidence was as round, complete, and lucid as a Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS!  The Lord’s name be praised!  The dead pain in the semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of stupid, unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to man and beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when the dam loses her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped short.  There was a feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or cut a strangling garter,—­only it was all over my system.  What more could I ask to assure me of the Captain’s safety?  As soon as the telegraph-office opens to-morrow morning, we will send a message to our friends in Philadelphia, and get a reply, doubtless, which will settle the whole matter.