marquee. "Go in there and report yourself and get enrolled."
And the last I saw of him he was stumbling over the sticks in the right
direction. This was my first experience of a real _guerillo_--a
character with whom I was destined to make further experience in after
days.

An earlier incident was to me extremely curious. There was in our
battery a young gentleman named Stewart Patterson, noted for his
agreeable, refined manners. He was the gunner of our cannon No. Two. We
had brass Napoleons. At the distance of about one mile the rebels were
shelling us. Patterson brought _his_ gun to bear on theirs, and the two
exchanged shots at the same instant. Out of the smoke surrounding
Patterson's gun I saw a sword-blade fly perhaps thirty feet, and then
himself borne by two or three men, blood flowing profusely. The four
fingers of his right hand had been cut away clean by a piece of shell.

At the instant I saw the blade flash in its flight, I recalled seeing
precisely the same thing long before in Heidelberg. There was a famous
duellist who had fought sixty or seventy times and never received a
scratch. One day he was acting as _second_, when the blade of his
principal, becoming broken at the hilt by a violent blow, flew across the
room, rebounded, and cut the second's lip entirely open. It was
remarkable that I should twice in my life have seen such a thing, in both
instances accompanied by wounds. Long after I met Patterson in
Philadelphia, I think, in 1883. He did not recognise me, and gave me his
left hand. I said, "Not that hand, Patterson, but the other. You've no
reason to be ashamed of it. I saw the fingers shot off."

But on that night there occurred an event which, in the end, after years
of suffering, caused the deepest sorrow of my life. As we were not
firing, I and the rest of the men of the gun were lying on the ground to
escape the shells, but my brother, who was nothing if not soldierly and
punctilious, stood upright in his place just beside me. There came a
shell which burst immediately, and very closely over our heads, and a
piece of it struck my brother exactly on the brass buckle in his belt on
the spine. The blow was so severe that the buckle was bent in two. It
cut through his coat and shirt, and inflicted a slight wound two inches
in length. But the blow on the spine had produced a concussion or
disorganisation of the brain, which proved, after years of suffering, the
cause of