When the boat is launched, give such help as you can in getting
the women and children into it, and be sure you don't try to get into it
yourself. It is summer weather, the river is only a mile wide, as a
rule, and you can swim that without any trouble." Two or three days
afterward the boat's boilers exploded at Ship Island, below Memphis,
early one morning--and what happened afterward I have already told in
"Old Times on the Mississippi." As related there, I followed the
"Pennsylvania" about a day later, on another boat, and we began to get
news of the disaster at every port we touched at, and so by the time we
reached Memphis we knew all about it.

I found Henry stretched upon a mattress on the floor of a great
building, along with thirty or forty other scalded and wounded persons,
and was promptly informed, by some indiscreet person, that he had
inhaled steam; that his body was badly scalded, and that he would live
but a little while; also, I was told that the physicians and nurses were
giving their whole attention to persons who had a chance of being saved.
They were short-handed in the matter of physicians and nurses; and Henry
and such others as were considered to be fatally hurt were receiving
only such attention as could be spared, from time to time, from the more
urgent cases. But Dr. Peyton, a fine and large-hearted old physician of
great reputation in the community, gave me his sympathy and took
vigorous hold of the case, and in about a week he had brought Henry
around. Dr. Peyton never committed himself with prognostications which
might not materialize, but at eleven o'clock one night he told me that
Henry was out of danger, and would get well. Then he said, "At midnight
these poor fellows lying here and there all over this place will begin
to mourn and mutter and lament and make outcries, and if this commotion
should disturb Henry it will be bad for him; therefore ask the physician
on watch to give him an eighth of a grain of morphine, but this is not
to be done unless Henry shall show signs that he is being disturbed."

Oh well, never mind the rest of it. The physicians on watch were young
fellows hardly out of the medical college, and they made a mistake--they
had no way of measuring the eighth of a grain of morphine, so they
guessed at it and gave him a vast quantity heaped on the end of a
knife-blade, and the fatal effects were soon apparent. I think he died
about dawn, I don't remember as to that. He