but an old mother; didn’t know what he should do if he lost her.  Though so long in this country, he had all the simplicity and childlike lightheartedness which belong to the Old World’s people.  He laughed at the smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white English teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small store of information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me.  His quiet animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of anxiety, and I liked his frequent “’Deed I don’t know, sir.” better than I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the second time.  Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded Colonel and his lady.  She gave me a most touching account of all the suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he succeeded in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper means of transportation of the wounded after the battle.  It occurred to me, while at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the first time in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with whom the Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth, educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk.  He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard, who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light of day.  He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the rest, which I remember well having seen there,—­the “sudabit multum.” and others,—­also of our New York Professor Carnochan’s handiwork, a specimen of which I once admired at the New York College.  But the doctor was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed willing to forget the present in the past:  things went wrong, somehow, and the time was out of joint with him.

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own wide bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in Middletown.  Here I lay awake again another night.  Close to the house stood an ambulance in which was a wounded Rebel officer, attended by one of their own surgeons.  He was calling out in a loud voice, all night long, as it seemed to me, “Doctor!  Doctor!  Driver!  Water!” in loud, complaining tones, I have no doubt of real suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent patience which was the almost universal rule.