ll, let him be
assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any accommodation
from being in my company, let me tell him that I learned a lesson from
his active benevolence. I could, however, have wished to hear him laugh
once before we parted, perhaps forever. He did not, to the best of
my recollection, even smile during the whole period that we were in
company. I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor
are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in
people of sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding
in passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a
practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with
its peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its
agencies, an organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves,
and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of
cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave,
occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social
force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through
its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it
whistles and sings at its work. When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled
with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospitals, he
found his temper and manners very different from what would have been
expected.

My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration
of the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as above
mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them. The authorities
of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of that place, for
such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I have never seen in
the streets of a civilized town. It was getting late in the evening when
we began our rounds. The principal collections of the wounded were in
the churches. Boards were laid over the tops of the pews, on these
some straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with little or
no covering other than such scanty clothes as they had on. There were
wounds of all degrees of severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs.
Most of the sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone
amputation, and all had, I presume, received such attention as was
required. Still, it was but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the
extemporized hospitals suggested. I could not help think