discovered a strange formation in his vest pocket. In
it he had a bunch of small keys on a ring. A Minnie bullet had struck
his belt plate square and had glanced so as to go under the plate into
his vest pocket, where it met the bunch of keys. There was enough force
and resistance to bed the bullet into the ring and the key heads, and
there the keys stood out held in place by the embedded bullet. He was
able to send this relic of that great battle home, and his mother has it
now among her choicest mementos.

After a time the division operating table was set up in the edge of a
piece of timber not very far away. I was on the watch, expecting every
minute to be taken out, but I waited and waited and no one came for me.
I became quite impatient at this delay. I saw one after another brought
on, carried up, and taken away, and I was not called for. This aroused
my stock of impatience, of which, I naturally always had quite enough.
At last I asked my friend Porter E. Whitney and another man to take me
down to the table. I made up my mind, if the mountain did not go to
Mahomet, the next best thing was for the prophet to go to the mountain.
The men set me down as nearly under the noses of the doctors as could
be, and, if something hadn't happened, I presume in a few minutes that
heretofore good left leg would have made one of the fast growing pile;
but about that interesting moment for me, the enemy began to drop shells
that exploded in and about the locality. It was not a fit place to
pursue surgical operations. The doctors knew it, so they hastily
gathered up their knives and saws, and moved to a place where those
projectiles did not drop. The two friends who had taken me there, picked
up my stretcher and started for a like place. We had to move several
times before the greatest artillery duel of the War began. When that
opened we were out of range of it, but we could not hide from the
tremble of the ground--the surface of the earth at that place shook and
quivered from the terrible concussion of the artillery. The roar was
enough to deafen one, and inspire the dread that no one would be left
alive and unhurt. Generally however, the noise is a considerable part of
such a bombardment. Probably comparatively slight damage was done by it,
until our artillery opened on the advancing lines of Pickett's men.

During the day friends occasionally poured water on my wounds, which,
doubtless, kept the swelling down.

Pickett was def