He had met with a severe accident by a fall on shipboard. The
hospital is a large edifice of red freestone, with wide, airy passages,
resounding with footsteps passing through them. A porter was waiting in
the vestibule. Mr. Wilding and myself were shown to the parlor, in the
first instance,--a neat, plainly furnished room, with newspapers and
pamphlets lying on the table and sofas. Soon the surgeon of the house
came,--a brisk, alacritous, civil, cheerful young man, by whom we were
shown to the apartment where the mate was lying. As we went through the
principal passage, a man was borne along in a chair looking very pale,
rather wild, and altogether as if he had just been through great
tribulation, and hardly knew as yet whereabouts he was. I noticed that
his left arm was but a stump, and seemed done up in red baize,--at all
events it was of a scarlet line. The surgeon shook his right hand
cheerily, and he was carried on. This was a patient who had just had his
arm cut off. He had been a rough person apparently, but now there was a
kind of tenderness about him, through pain and helplessness.
In the chamber where the mate lay, there were seven beds, all of them
occupied by persons who had met with accidents. In the centre of the
room was a stationary pine table, about the length of a man, intended, I
suppose, to stretch patients upon for necessary operations. The
furniture of the beds was plain and homely. I thought that the faces of
the patients all looked remarkably intelligent, though they were
evidently men of the lower classes.
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