f
humanity, pale, sallow, and miser-able as fever and flannel could paint
him.

Yes, gentle reader, under the shade of a dwarf fig-tree, in the Leper
Hospital of Bexar, I sat, attired in a whole suit of flannel, of a pale,
brown tint, looking like a faded flea, all my gay spirits fled, and
my very identity merged into the simple fact that I was known as
"Convalescent, No. 303,"--an announcement which, for memory's sake,
perhaps, was stamped upon the front of my nightcap.

Few people are fortunate enough not to remember the strange jumble of
true and false, the incoherent tissue of fact and fancy, which assails
the first moments of recovery from illness. It is a pitiable period,
with its thronging thoughts, all too weighty for the light brain that
should bear them. You follow your ideas like an ill-mounted horseman in
a hunt; no sooner have you caught a glimpse of the game than it is lost
again; on you go, wearied by the pace, but never cheered by success;
often tumbling into a slough, missing your way, and mistaking the object
of pursuit: such are the casualties in either case, and they are not
enviable ones.

Now, lest I should seem to be a character of all others I detest, a
grumbler without cause, let me ask the reader to sit beside me for a
few seconds on this bench, and look with me at the prospect around him.
Yonder, that large white building, with grated windows, jail-like and
sad, is the Leper Hospital of Bexar, an institution originally intended
for the sick of that one malady, but, under the impression of its
being contagious, generously extended to those laboring under any other
disease. The lepers are that host who sit in groups upon the grass, at
cards or dice, or walk in little knots of two and three. Their
shambling gait and crippled figures,--the terrible evidence of their
malady,--twisted limbs, contorted into every horrible variety of
lameness, hands with deficient fingers, faces without noses, are the
ordinary symbols. The voices, too, are either husky and unnatural, or
reduced to a thin, reedy treble, like the wail of an infant. Worse
than all, far more awful to contemplate, to him exposed to such
companionship, their minds would appear more diseased than even their
bodies: some evincing this aberration by traits of ungovernable passion,
some by the querulous irritability of peevish childhood, and some by
the fatuous vacuity of idiocy; and here am I gazing upon all this, and
speculating, by the a