Ten o’clock in the evening was approaching.  The telegraph-office would presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown.  Let us step over and see for ourselves.  A message!  A message!

“Captain H still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is doing well

Mrs H K_ ——.”

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall.  For now the over-tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost fibres.  Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us.  He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me to be.  His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers are supposed to possess in abounding measure.  While I fell short of his ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday.  The train from Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A.M.  We took another ride behind the codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again.  Being in a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as seen by the different lights of evening and morning.  After this, we visited the school-house hospital.  A fine young fellow, whose arm had been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lockjaw.  The beads of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and contracted features.  He was under the effect of opiates,—­why not (if his case was desperate, as it seemed to be considered) stop his sufferings with chloroform?  It was suggested that it might shorten life.  “What then?” I said.  “Are a dozen additional spasms worth living for?”