a little boy who has been kind he asks
them to send him his Chinese postage stamps; he plans a trip he will
take with them when he is stronger, knowing he never will be stronger.
The doctors had urged upon him a certain operation, and of it to a
friend he wrote: "I know that I will have to have a piece about three
inches square cut out of my skull, and this nerve cut off near the
middle of the brain, as well as my eye taken out (for a couple of hours
only, provided it is not mislaid, and can be found). Doctor ------ and
his crowd show a bad memory for failures. As a result of this operation
others have told me--I forget the percentage of deaths, which does not
matter, but--that a large percentage have become insane. And some lost
their sight."

While threatened with insanity and complete blindness, and hourly from
his wounds suffering a pain drugs could not master, he dictated for the
_Century Magazine_ the only complete account of the battle of the Yalu.
In a letter to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder he writes: "...my eyes are
troubling me. I cannot see even what I am writing now, and am getting
the article under difficulties. I yet hope to place it in your hands by
the 21st, still, if my eyes grow worse------"

"Still, if my eyes grow worse------"

The unfinished sentence was grimly prophetic.

Unknown to his attendants at the hospital, among the papers in his
despatch-box he had secreted his service revolver. On the morning of the
11th of February, 1897, he asked for this box, and on some pretext sent
the nurse from the room. When the report of the pistol brought them
running to his bedside, they found the pain-driven body at peace, and
the tired eyes dark forever.

In the article in the _Century_ on the battle of the Yalu, he had said:

"Chief among those who have died for their country is Admiral Ting Ju
Chang, a gallant soldier and true gentleman. Betrayed by his countrymen,
fighting against odds, almost his last official act was to stipulate
for the lives of his officers and men. His own he scorned to save, well
knowing that his ungrateful country would prove less merciful than his
honorable foe. Bitter, indeed, must have been the reflections of the
old, wounded hero, in that midnight hour, as he drank the poisoned cup
that was to give him rest."

And bitter indeed must have been the reflections of the young wounded
American, robbed, by the parsimony of his country, of the right he had
earned to serve it, and