stance. We
exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses' heads
were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I saw them
no more. On my way back, I fell into talk with James Grayden. Born in
England, Lancashire; in this country since he was four years old. Had
nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't know what he should do if
he lost her. Though so long in this country, he had all the simplicity
and childlike lightheartedness which belong to the Old World's people.
He laughed at the smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white English
teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very
limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small store of
information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me. His quiet
animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of
anxiety, and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don't know, sir." better than
I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other
very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the
second time. Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded
Colonel and his lady. She gave me a most touching account of all the
suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he succeeded
in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper means of
transportation of the wounded after the battle. It occurred to me, while
at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the first time
in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with whom the
Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth,
educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk.
He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous
Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in
the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch
from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those
frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard,
who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light
of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of
Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the
rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the "sudabit multum."
and others,--also of our New York Professor Carnochan's