h a gourdful, which I
eagerly drank. An hour later the graybacks returned, and finding that
I was too weak to walk, carried me out and laid me on the bottom of
a common cart, with which they set off on a trot. The jolting was
horrible, but within an hour I began to have in my dead right hand a
strange burning, which was rather a relief to me. It increased as the
sun rose and the day grew warm, until I felt as if the hand was caught
and pinched in a red-hot vise. Then in my agony I begged my guard for
water to wet it with, but for some reason they desired silence, and at
every noise threatened me with a revolver. At length the pain became
absolutely unendurable, and I grew what it is the fashion to call
demoralized. I screamed, cried, and yelled in my torture, until, as
I suppose, my captors became alarmed, and, stopping, gave me a
handkerchief,--my own, I fancy,--and a canteen of water, with which I
wetted the hand, to my unspeakable relief.

It is unnecessary to detail the events by which, finally, I found myself
in one of the rebel hospitals near Atlanta. Here, for the first time, my
wounds were properly cleansed and dressed by a Dr. Oliver T. Wilson,
who treated me throughout with great kindness. I told him I had been a
doctor, which, perhaps, may have been in part the cause of the unusual
tenderness with which I was managed. The left arm was now quite easy,
although, as will be seen, it never entirely healed. The right arm was
worse than ever--the humerus broken, the nerves wounded, and the hand
alive only to pain. I use this phrase because it is connected in my
mind with a visit from a local visitor,--I am not sure he was a
preacher,--who used to go daily through the wards, and talk to us or
write our letters. One morning he stopped at my bed, when this little
talk occurred:

"How are you, lieutenant?"

"Oh," said I, "as usual. All right, but this hand, which is dead except
to pain."

"Ah," said he, "such and thus will the wicked be--such will you be if
you die in your sins: you will go where only pain can be felt. For all
eternity, all of you will be just like that hand--knowing pain only."

I suppose I was very weak, but somehow I felt a sudden and chilling
horror of possible universal pain, and suddenly fainted. When I awoke
the hand was worse, if that could be. It was red, shining, aching,
burning, and, as it seemed to me, perpetually rasped with hot files.
When the doctor came I begged for morphia. He sa