tramp of men and horses, and the struggle of every wheeled thing that
could carry wounded soldiers; jolted among the dying and the dead, so
disfigured by blood and mud as to be hardly recognisable for humanity;
undisturbed by the moaning of men and the shrieking of horses, which,
newly taken from the peaceful pursuits of life, could not endure the
sight of the stragglers lying by the wayside, never to resume their
toilsome journey; dead, as to any sentient life that was in it, and yet
alive,--the form that had been Lieutenant Richard Doubledick, with whose
praises England rang, was conveyed to Brussels. There it was tenderly
laid down in hospital; and there it lay, week after week, through the
long bright summer days, until the harvest, spared by war, had ripened
and was gathered in.

Over and over again the sun rose and set upon the crowded city; over and
over again the moonlight nights were quiet on the plains of Waterloo: and
all that time was a blank to what had been Lieutenant Richard Doubledick.
Rejoicing troops marched into Brussels, and marched out; brothers and
fathers, sisters, mothers, and wives, came thronging thither, drew their
lots of joy or agony, and departed; so many times a day the bells rang;
so many times the shadows of the great buildings changed; so many lights
sprang up at dusk; so many feet passed here and there upon the pavements;
so many hours of sleep and cooler air of night succeeded: indifferent to
all, a marble face lay on a bed, like the face of a recumbent statue on
the tomb of Lieutenant Richard Doubledick.

Slowly labouring, at last, through a long heavy dream of confused time
and place, presenting faint glimpses of army surgeons whom he knew, and
of faces that had been familiar to his youth,--dearest and kindest among
them, Mary Marshall's, with a solicitude upon it more like reality than
anything he could discern,--Lieutenant Richard Doubledick came back to