all likelihood, as great an impertinence as that of
the tiresome guest who, having kept you two hours from your bed by his
uninteresting twaddle, asks you to forgive him at last for an abrupt
departure. I am already too full of gratitude for the patience that has
been conceded to me so far, to desire to trifle with it during the brief
space that is now to link us together. And believe me, kind reader, there
is more in that same tie than perhaps you think, especially where the
intercourse had been carried on, and, as it were, fed from month to month.
In such cases the relationship between him who writes and him who reads
assumes something like acquaintanceship; heightened by a greater desire on
one side to please, than is usually felt in the routine business of
everyday life. Nor is it a light reward, if one can think that he has
relieved a passing hour of solitude or discomfort, shortened a wintry
night, or made a rainy day more endurable. I speak not here of the greater
happiness in knowing that our inmost thoughts have found their echo in far
away hearts, kindling noble emotions, and warming generous aspirations,
teaching courage and hope by the very commonest of lessons; and showing
that, in the moral as in the vegetable world, the bane and antidote grow
side by side; and, as the eastern poet has it, "He who shakes the tree of
sorrow, is often sowing the seeds of joy." Such are the triumphs of very
different efforts from mine, however, and I come back to the humble theme
from which I started.

If I do not chronicle the incidents which succeeded to the events of my
last chapter, it is, in the first place, because they are most imperfectly
impressed upon my own memory; and, in the second, they are of a nature
which, whether in the hearing or the telling, can afford little pleasure;
for what if I should enlarge upon a text which runs but on suffering and
sickness, nights of feverish agony, days of anguish, terrible alternations
of hope and fear, ending, at last, in the sad, sad certainty, that skill
has found its limit. The art of the surgeon can do no more, and Maurice
Tiernay must consent to lose his leg! Such was the cruel news I was
compelled to listen to as I awoke one morning dreaming, and for the first
time since my accident, of my life in Kuffstein. The injuries I had
received before being rescued from the Danube, had completed the mischief
already begun, and all chance of saving my limb had now fled. I am not
s