it was cheerless enough. The rain was
falling fast and the snow melting in the streets. My brother was
watching for me, and came out at once. "Poor Whiston is dead," said
he, as he shut the carriage-door. "He wished me to thank you for your
kindness to him," and I saw the tears in Jack's eyes. "There's another
star for the catalogue,--how small the class is growing! Poor fellow!
I didn't know he had gone, I thought he was asleep, for we were
talking together only a few minutes before. He was not at all
bewildered, as you saw him yesterday."

I heard this case talked over more than once by my brother, and one or
two professional friends of his who came often to the house. Nobody
was ready to believe that Mr. Whiston had seen an apparition; but the
truth always remained that the man's nerves were so shocked by what he
believed to be the appearance of a ghost, that he had become the prey
of a monomania, and had by little and little grown incapable of
distinguishing between real things and the creations and projections
of his own unsteady brain. _Il s'ecoutait vivre_, as the French phrase
has it; and, having nothing to live for but this, it was well that
life was over for him. I suppose the acute disease of which he died
met with little resistance, for he looked so ill when we first saw
him; but it would have been sadder if he had lingered a few more
years, so miserable as he was,--hardly fit either for the inside of an
asylum or the outside,--to die at last without money or friends to
give him the last of this world's comforts, perhaps without mind
enough left to miss them.

Strangely enough, some months after this, when it was spring, my
brother found Dunster at the Marine Hospital in Chelsea, where he had
gone with another surgeon to see a curious operation in which he felt
a great interest. He was walking through the accident ward when
somebody called him from one of the cots,--a wretched-looking
vagabond, whom at first he did not recognize. But it was Dunster, and
he tried to put on something of his old manner, which made him seem
like a wretched copy of his former self.

Jack made him give an account of himself. It seemed that he had been
thrown among the dead in that battle when he was supposed to have been
killed; but he had recovered his senses, and crawled from the place
where he had fallen farther into the enemy's lines, and he had been
sent to the rear. He had nearly died from the effects of his wounds,
and