le-day to draw the fatal aim of a French marksman. The bullet-hole
is visible on the shoulder, as well as a part of the golden tassels of
an epaulet, the rest of which was shot away. Over the coat is laid a
white waistcoat with a great blood-stain on it, out of which all the
redness has utterly faded, leaving it of a dingy yellow hue, in the
threescore years since that blood gushed out. Yet it was once the
reddest blood in England,--Nelson's blood!

The hospital stands close adjacent to the town of Greenwich, which will
always retain a kind of festal aspect in my memory, in consequence of
my having first become acquainted with it on Easter Monday. Till a few
years ago, the first three days of Easter were a carnival-season in this
old town, during which the idle and disreputable part of London poured
itself into the streets like an inundation of the Thames,--as unclean
as that turbid mixture of the offscourings of the vast city, and
overflowing with its grimy pollution whatever rural innocence, if any,
might be found in the suburban neighborhood. This festivity was called
Greenwich Fair, the final one of which, in an immemorial succession, it
was my fortune to behold.

If I had bethought myself of going through the fair with a note-book and
pencil, jotting down all the prominent objects, I doubt not that the
result might have been a sketch of English life quite as characteristic
and worthy of historical preservation as an account of the Roman
Carnival. Having neglected to do so, I remember little more than a
confusion of unwashed and shabbily dressed people, intermixed with some
smarter figures, but, on the whole, presenting a mobbish appearance
such as we never see in our own country. It taught me to understand why
Shakspeare, in speaking of a crowd, so often alludes to its attribute
of evil odor. The common people of England, I am afraid, have no daily
familiarity with even so necessary a thing as a washbowl, not to mention
a bathing-tub. And furthermore, it is one mighty difference between
them and us, that every man and woman on our side of the water has a
working-day suit and a holiday suit, and is occasionally as fresh as a
rose, whereas, in the good old country, the griminess of his labor or
squalid habits clings forever to the individual, and gets to be a part
of his personal substance. These are broad facts, involving great
corollaries and dependencies. There are really, if you stop to think
about it, few sadde