ation. Just
not too late he received the offer of a commission; kept the letter
there open within sight. Aldy, who "never shed tears and was incapable
of pain," in his great physical weakness, wept--shall we say for the
second time in his life? A less excitement would have been more
favorable to any chance there might be of the patient's surviving. In
fact the old gun-shot wound, wrongly thought to be cured, which had
caused [243] the one illness of his life, is now drawing out what
remains of it, as he feels with a kind of odd satisfaction and
pride--his old glorious wound! And then, as of old, an absolute
submissiveness comes over him, as he gazes round at the place, the
relics of his uniform, the letter lying there. It was as if there was
nothing more that could be said. Accounts thus settled, he stretched
himself in the bed he had occupied as a boy, more completely at his
ease than since the day when he had left home for the first time.
Respited from death once, he was twice believed to be dead before the
date actually registered on his tomb. "What will it matter a hundred
years hence?" they used to ask by way of simple comfort in boyish
troubles at school, overwhelming at the moment. Was that in truth part
of a certain revelation of the inmost truth of things to "babes," such
as we have heard of? What did it matter--the gifts, the good-fortune,
its terrible withdrawal, the long agony? Emerald Uthwart would have
been all but a centenarian to-day.

Postscript, from the Diary of a Surgeon, August --th, 18--.

I was summoned by letter into the country to perform an operation on
the dead body of a young man, formerly an officer in the army. The
cause of death is held to have been some [244] kind of distress of
mind, concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound, the ball
still remaining somewhere in the body. My instructions were to remove
this, at the express desire, as I understood, of the deceased, rather
than to ascertain the precise cause of death. This however became
apparent in the course of my search for the ball, which had enveloped
itself in the muscular substance in the region of the heart, and was
removed with difficulty. I have known cases of this kind, where
anxiety has caused incurable cardiac derangement (the deceased seems to
have been actually sentenced to death for some military offence when on
service in Flanders), and such mental strain would of course have been
aggravated by