"The large ward I am in is used for secession soldiers exclusively. One man, about forty years of age, emaciated with diarrhoea, I was attracted to, as he lay with his eyes turned up, looking like death. His weakness was so extreme that it took a minute or so every time for him to talk with anything like consecutive meaning; yet he was evidently a man of good intelligence and education. As I said anything, he would lie a moment perfectly still, then, with closed eyes, answer in a low, very slow voice, quite correct and sensible, but in a way and tone that wrung my heart. He had a mother, wife and child, living (or probably living) in his home in Mississippi. It was long, long since he had seen them. Had he caused a letter to be sent them since he got here in Washington? No answer. I repeated the question very slowly and soothingly. He could not tell whether he had or not--things of late seemed to him like a dream. After waiting a moment, I said: 'Well, I am going to walk down the ward a moment, and when I come back you can tell me. If you have not written, I will sit down and write.' A few minutes after I returned; he said he remembered now that some one had written for him two or three days before. The presence of this man impressed me profoundly. The flesh was all sunken on face and arms; the eyes low in their sockets and glassy, and with purple rings around them. Two or three great tears silently flowed out from the eyes, and rolled down his temples (he was doubtless unused to be spoken to as I was speaking to him). Sickness, imprisonment, exhaustion, etc., had conquered the body, yet the mind held mastery still, and called even wandering remembrance back."[400] At times the tragedy unnerved him, so that even his native optimism was clouded. "I believe there is not much but trouble in this world," we find him writing to his mother, and the page hardly reads like one of his; "if one hasn't any for himself, he has it made up by having it brought close to him through others, and that is sometimes worse than to have it touch oneself."[401] He had already learnt the primer of sorrow; now he was studying the lore in which he was to become so deeply read. * * * * * Even that first summer the malarial climate and excessive heat of Washington, with the close watching in the wards, and the continual draught upon his vital forces, affected him perceptibly. In his letters home he mentions heavy colds, with deafness and trouble in his head caused by the awful heat,[402] as giving him some anxiety. He seems to have had a slight sun-stroke in earlier years, which made him more susceptible to this kind of weakness; and on hot days he went armed with a big umbrella and a fan.[403] But through all this time he seemed to his friends the very incarnation of his "robust soul". [Illustration: JOHN BURROUGHS AT SIXTY-THREE]