uld
thank me to come down and take his last message to his relatives.
Alarmed, I instantly went down. I found him with two or three splitting
a small log of wood!

"Gardner, I hear you are a little 'under the weather.'"

"Dying, Colonel, dying!"

"What appears to be your disease?"

"Flag-o'-truce-on-the-brain!"

"Ah, you've got the exchange fever?"

"Yes; bad."

"Pulse run high?"

"Three hundred a minute."

"Anything I can do for you?"

"Yes, Colonel, beseech that fool doctor to send me to hospital. Tell him
I'm on my last legs. Tell him I only want to die there. Appeal to him in
behalf of my poor wife and babies." (Gardner, as I well knew, was a
bachelor, and had no children--to speak of.)

"Well, Lieutenant, I'll do anything I properly can for you. Is there
anything else?"

"Yes, Colonel; lend me your overcoat to wear to hospital; I'll send it
back at once."

"But, Lieutenant, you can't get into the hospital. Your cheeks are too
rosy; you're the picture of health."

"I'm glad you mentioned that, Colonel. I'll fix that. You'll see."

Next morning he watched at the window, and when he saw the doctor
coming, he swallowed a large pill of plug tobacco. The effect was more
serious than he expected. In a few minutes he became sick in earnest,
and was frightened. A deathlike pallor supervened. When the doctor
reached him, there was a genuine fit of vomiting. The story runs that
Captain Tiemann made a pathetic appeal in behalf of the imaginary twin
babies, that the doctor diagnosed it as a clear case of puerperal (which
he pronounced "puerp[=e]rial") fever complicated with symptoms of
cholera infantum, and ordered him to hospital at once! I loaned the
patient my overcoat, which he sent back directly. His recovery seemed
miraculous. In a week or two he returned from his delightful outing.
This was in the latter part of November.

Previously, for some weeks, Captain Howe and three or four other strong
and determined officers managed to get into the cellar of a one-story
building contiguous to ours and thence to excavate a tunnel out beyond
the line on which the sentinels were perpetually pacing to and fro. I
was too feeble to join in the enterprise, but hoped to improve the
opportunity to escape when the work was done. Unfortunately the arching
top of the tunnel was too near the surface of the ground, and the thin
crust gave way under the weight of a sentry. He yelled "Murder!" Two or
three of our digg