[Footnote 2:  By recent provision the Chinese are allowed to buy foreign vessels.]

POSEY’S NUGGET.

When the California “gold fever” broke out in the spring of 1849, Doctor Hanchett was living at Clarksville in Southern Indiana.  Doctor Hanchett, it should be stated, had received his professional title not by the favor of any medical college or other learned institution, but through the simpler and less formal method that obtains among the free and generous people amongst whom his lines were cast.  The process may be explained in a few words.  In the fall of 1846 a recruiting station was established at Vicksburg to enlist volunteers for the war with Mexico, and Hanchett, at that time a resident of Vicksburg, and laboring in a profession—­the saltatorial, to wit—­a shade less illustrious than that to which he was so soon to attain, was the first man in the city to enlist.  This momentous circumstance procured for him not only the prompt recognition of a patriotic press, which blazoned his name abroad with so many eccentricities of spelling that he came near losing his identity, but also gave him a claim in courtesy to such a position in the organization of his company, within the grasp of the mere high private, as he might select.  After due deliberation he chose that of company commissary—­an office unknown, I think, to the United States Army Regulations, but none the less familiar to our volunteer service.  To this post he was promptly appointed by his captain; and, thus placed in the line of promotion, he rose rapidly till he attained the rank of hospital steward.  The thing was done.  Hanchett was Doctor Hanchett from that day, and the title was very much the larger part of the man ever after.  How he had lived for forty years or more without it is still a mystery.

When the war was over, Doctor Hanchett stranded upon the northern bank of the Ohio, in the State of Indiana.  As a returning brave he was, naturally, quite warmly received.  As a veteran not unwilling to recount his adventures by flood and field, he speedily became famous as the hero of many deeds of valor and of blood.  He had been assistant surgeon of his regiment, it appeared, but nevertheless had fought in the ranks in every important engagement of the war from Monterey to Churubusco, and the number of men who had fallen by his own hand from first to last he could not undertake to estimate.  Though traces of a somewhat lively imagination might be detected in most of the doctor’s stories, there is really no good reason to doubt that he spoke the simple truth when he averred that with his red right hand he had mowed down men like grass, for he actually retained the position of hospital steward throughout the whole term of his service.

Finding himself after the lapse of a few weeks not without honor in this Indiana town, he struck out suddenly one day a brilliant idea:  he would devote his remaining years to the practice of the profession into which Fortune had so kindly inducted him.  He hired a house, hung out his banner, and wrote to his wife and daughter, who had remained at Vicksburg, to come on immediately to his new home, as his fortune was now made.