destined for my sole possession.  As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the Philanthropist clave unto me.  “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.”  A really kind, good man, full of zeal, determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought, he doubted nobody’s willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a purely benevolent errand.  When he reads this, as I hope he will, let him be assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any accommodation from being in my company, let me tell him that I learned a lesson from his active benevolence.  I could, however, have wished to hear him laugh once before we parted, perhaps forever.  He did not, to the best of my recollection, even smile during the whole period that we were in company.  I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions of sympathy.  Working philanthropy is a practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with its peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of hunger, and of watching.  Philanthropists are commonly grave, occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose.  Their expansive social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its legitimate pistons and cranks.  The tighter the boiler, the less it whistles and sings at its work.  When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospitals, he found his temper and manners very different from what would have been expected.

My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration of the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as above mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them.  The authorities of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of that place, for such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I have never seen in the streets of a civilized town.  It was getting late in the evening when we began our rounds.  The principal collections of the wounded were in the churches.  Boards were laid over the tops of the pews, on these some straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with little or no covering other than such scanty clothes as they had on.  There were wounds of all degrees of severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs.  Most of the sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all had, I presume, received such attention as was required.  Still, it was but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals suggested.  I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but they were used to camp life, and did not complain.