principal passage, a man was borne along in a chair looking very pale,
rather wild, and altogether as if he had just been through great
tribulation, and hardly knew as yet whereabouts he was. I noticed that
his left arm was but a stump, and seemed done up in red baize,--at all
events it was of a scarlet line. The surgeon shook his right hand
cheerily, and he was carried on. This was a patient who had just had his
arm cut off. He had been a rough person apparently, but now there was a
kind of tenderness about him, through pain and helplessness.

In the chamber where the mate lay, there were seven beds, all of them
occupied by persons who had met with accidents. In the centre of the
room was a stationary pine table, about the length of a man, intended, I
suppose, to stretch patients upon for necessary operations. The
furniture of the beds was plain and homely. I thought that the faces of
the patients all looked remarkably intelligent, though they were
evidently men of the lower classes. Suffering had educated them morally
and intellectually. They gazed curiously at Mr. Wilding and me, but
nobody said a word. In the bed next to the mate lay a little boy with a
broken thigh. The surgeon observed that children generally did well with
accidents; and this boy certainly looked very bright and cheerful. There
was nothing particularly interesting about the mate.

After finishing our business, the surgeon showed us into another room of
the surgical ward, likewise devoted to cases of accident and injury. All
the beds were occupied, and in two of them lay two American sailors who
had recently been stabbed. They had been severely hurt, but were doing
very well. The surgeon thought that it was a good arrangement to have
several cases together, and that the patients kept up one another's
spirits,--being often merry together. Smiles and laughter may operate
favorably enough from bed to bed; but dying groans, I should think, must