old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some
of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares,
and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the
piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,--and all this after the
swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the
dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting
ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart! Thanks, uncounted
thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him
from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite
bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well
under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging
everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time
and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of
the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind
companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these
benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was no
longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were _Kool Slaa_ and
_Schmeer Kase_, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet,
simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant
of _Baked Beans_, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed
in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known
to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also
approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom,
we passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so
good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it
as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of
that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the
country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by
its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our
economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences,
and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American
city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. It is not a breeding-place
of ideas, which makes it a more agreeable residence for average people.
It is the gre