.

He heard my voice, and called "Mutter! mutter!"

I pushed past the orderly, ran to him, and his pleading eyes seemed to
devour me as he fastened his gaze on my face. I cannot think to this day
why be should have been nude for the amputation of a foot; but he was,
and some one threw a towel across his loins as I approached.

Dr. Baxter said:

"No sympathy! no sympathy!"

So I stood by him, placed a hand on each side of his corrugated brow,
steadied my voice and said:

"Be a man and a soldier!"

He had asked me for bread; I gave him a stone, and no wonder he dashed
it back in my face. With a fierce cry he said:

"I hev been a man and a sojer long enough!"

Ah! verily had he, and much too long. Days before that he should have
been "a boy again;" aye, a baby, a very infant--should have been soothed
and softened and comforted with all the tenderness of mother-love; but
even now, in this cruel extremity, every sign of sympathy was denied
him. Some one put a hand gently but firmly on each of my shoulders,
turned my back to him, took me out of the room, and I hurried away,
while the air shuddered with his shrieks and groans. After he had been
brought back to his place in the ward I could often hear him as I passed
to and from my room, and even while I occupied it.

Once he saw me through the open door, and called, "Mutter! mutter!"

I went, knelt by him, took his hands, which were stretched appealingly
to me, and spoke comforting words, while his blue eyes seemed ready to
start from their sockets, as he clung to my hands with the old familiar
cry:

"Oh, Mutter! Mutter!"

He was strapped down to his iron cot, about as closely as he had been to
the amputation table, and the cot fastened to the floor. I had not been
five minutes at his side when his special nurse hurried up and warned me
to leave, saying:

"It's surgeon's orders. He's not going to have any babyin'!"

I drew my hands from the frantic grasp, took away that last hold on
human sympathy, and hurried oat, while his cry of "Oh, mutter! mutter!"
rung in my ears as I turned and looked on his pure high brow for the
last time.

Next morning I heard he had lock-jaw, and that the surgeon was to leave.

The night after that victim of some frightful, fiendish experiment had
been carried to the dead-house, I was passing through the ward, when
attracted by sounds of convulsive weeping, and I found a young man in an
agony of grief, in one of those sobbing f