Further details of the frightful accident, and of my treatment of the
case, might be interesting to such of the readers of this book as
happen to belong to my own profession; but to general readers such
details would be simply shocking. How even his tremendous vitality and
vigour of constitution brought him through it all is a mystery to me to
this day. I am thirty-six years older than I was at that time. Since
then I have acted as surgeon to a fighting regiment all through the
great rebellion. I have had patients of all sorts of temperaments and
constitutions under my charge, but never have I been brought into
contact with a case which seemed more hopeless in my eyes. He must
surely have had more than one life in him. I have never had my hands on
so magnificent a specimen of the human frame as his was; and better
still--and this doubtless contributed materially to his recovery--I
have never had a case under my management where the patient bore his
sufferings with such uniform fortitude and endurance. Suffice it to say
that he recovered, and that his face bore no traces of the frightful
ordeal through which he had passed. I don't think he was ever quite the
same man as before his accident. I think his nervous system received a
shock which eventually tended to shorten his life. But he was still
known as incomparably the strongest man in Peoria, and continued to
perform the work of two men at the moulding-shop on casting days. In
every other respect he was apparently the same; not a whit more
disposed to be companionable than before his accident. I used
frequently to meet him on the street, as he was going to and fro
between his boarding-house and the work-shop. He was always alone, and
more than once I came to a full stop and enquired after his health, or
anything else that seemed to afford a feasible topic for conversation.
He was uniformly civil, and even respectful, but confined his remarks
to replying to my questions, which, as usual, was done in the fewest
words.