Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/614

596 the trick. But that was difficult among such an innocent lot. We kept him in a continual state of nervousness, which would have ceased had he offered us one civil word.

Mr. "B.," as he was always called, was a good-hearted, deaf old bachelor, and we liked him very much, in spite of his eccentricities. He worked a few hours a day on the cheapest kind of physiological cuts, and we thought the different portions of the human system must be interchangeable, they looked so much alike. The brains and bowels, the lungs and kidneys, might have swapped offices. But we were sure nobody had anything like them inside, excepting Swallin. In addition to his duties as book-keeper and cashier, Mr. "B." was a professional pipe-smoker, and, laying aside his tool, he would make his room blue with a dense cloud, substantial enough to support all the castles he seemed always building. Suddenly he would be aroused from his revery by a little old man with scraggy gray hair, crooked nose, distorted mouth, queer legs, and large boots turned up in front like skates, carrying in each hand a two-gallon jug, that seemed to bend his legs. Mr. "B." made and sold Worcestershire sauce, and always kept a supply of some dozens of jugs in his room. The queer old man said, "Morn'n'," and Mr. "B." said, "Fine day." (He always greeted us with "Fine day," no matter what the weather outside.) Then they both made strange noises through their noses, like the snort of a frightened horse. The queer legs skated across the floor, and the crooked mouth said, very loudly, "Hi'll take choo, now, Hi'll take choo," and the little old man would hold up two stubby fingers to indicate the number of gallons. After his wants were supplied he skated off to the various restaurants. But he always came and went in the same manner, and always did and said the same things. It would be wearisome to detail the various expedients we resorted to to lubricate the balance-wheel of tedious labor.

But the war came. I dropped my tool and shouldered a musket. I marched and fought and bled in a way that now might seem all a dream but for a severe wound that cut short my military career at the battle of Antietam. For nine months in the hospitals of Bed Springs, Smoketown, and Frederick, in Maryland, I suffered almost beyond endurance from a wound that no surgeon has even to this day encouraged me to think I could much longer survive.

After six months I began to carve ornaments. Propped about with nineteen pillows and pads of all sorts, though I could move only my hands very carefully, there, lying upon my buck, I would grit my teeth, while with an old penknife I carved picture-frames of walnut from Antietam, rings and pen-racks of laurel-root from South Mountain, and pipes of the mulberry-tree of Newport News, under which Cornwallis surrendered his Yorktown army.

It was years before I was enabled to set up my engraving apparatus and recommence work. By the half-hour at a time I sought to do a little,—to make a trifling progress in my art. But what could it be, when every pick was pain and every line agony? For more than ten years insomnia induced by suffering turned for me night into day and day into an excruciating bondage. But, whatever of heart-wrung an-