mate carried thither more than
once. His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in
linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.
He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and
shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his
disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into
a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and
he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, HUMP
yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to
be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this
explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which
nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then
while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the
cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was
bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions; so the
doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind or out
of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by that
treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He suspected
that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his
water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once, when he had
been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his
hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst,
tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and
threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him.
Three times I saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed
to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and
demanded to be taken back. He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.

But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that
go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated
judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers
had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of
the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away,
and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' His hour had struck;
we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.

Chapter 21 A Section in My Biography

IN due cou