ith 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. The men who watched were
not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One of them was smoking his
pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw one poor fellow who had been shot
through the breast; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing,
anxious and restless. The men were debating about the opiate he was to
take, and I was thankful that I happened there at the right moment to see
that he was well narcotized for the night. Was it possible that my