--Private William Carter, æt. 24; admitted a week to-day. Gastric fever--typhoid form--slight delirium--bad case. Asked me to write to his mother--did not say where. _Mem_. to enquire among his division if anything is known about his friends. Corporal Thomas Hardman, æt. 50--Delirium tremens--mending. Knew him in the Crimea, when he was a perfectly sober fellow, with constitution of iron. "Trench work did it," he says, "and last winter's idleness." _Mem_. to send for him after his discharge from hospital, and see what can be done; also to see that decent body, his wife, after my rounds tomorrow. M. U.--Max Urquhart.--Max Urquhart, M.D., M.R.C.S. --Who keeps scribbling his name up and down this page like a silly school-boy, just for want of something to do. Something to do! Never for these twenty years and more have I been so totally without occupation. What a place this camp is! worse than ours in the Crimea, by far. To-day especially. Rain pouring, wind howling, mud ancle-deep; nothing on earth for me to be, to do, or to suffer, except--yes! there is something to suffer--Treherne's eternal flute. Faith, I must be very hard up for occupation when I thus continue this journal of my cases into a personal diary of the worst patient I have to deal with--the most thankless, unsatisfactory, and unkindly. Physician, heal thyself! But how? I shall tear out this page,--or stay, I'll keep it as a remarkable literary and psychological fact--and go on with my article on Gunshot Wounds. ***** In the which, two hours after, I find, I have written exactly ten lines. These must be the sort of circumstances under which people commit journals. For some do--and heartily as I have always contemned the proceeding, as we are prone to contemn peculiarities and idiosyncrasies quite foreign to our own,--I begin to-day dimly to understand the state of mind in which such a thing might be possible. "Diary of a Physician" shall I call it?--did not some one write a book with that title? I picked it up on ship-board--a story-book or some such thing--but I scarcely ever read what is called "light literature." I have never had time. Besides, all fictions grow tame, compared to the realities of daily life, the horrible episodes of crime, the pitiful bits of hopeless misery that I meet with in my profession. Talk of romance!-- Was I ever romantic? Once perhaps. Or at least I might have been. My profession, truly there is nothing like it for me. Therein I find incessant work, interest, hope. Daily do I thank heaven that I had courage to seize on it and go through with it, in order--according to the phrase I heard used last night--"to save life instead of destroying it." Poor little girl--she meant nothing--she had no idea what she was saying. Is it that which makes me so unsettled today?