"Is he, yer Honor?" very hesitatingly; and then, suddenly clearing up, "and hurra fur that, too! and I'm an ongrateful baste to be sorry that he's to be clear of this hole,--bad scran to it!--and long life till him, and a blessin' go wid him! and if"--choking--"we don't mate on earth, sure the Lord won't kape him foriver in purgatory, and he so kind and feelin' for the sick." The doctor could not suppress a laugh at this limited hope. "But, Corny, what if you are to be sent home too?" "Me?--and was it me yer Honor was sayin'? Och, Hivin bless ye fur that word!--and it's not laughin' at me is yer Honor? Sure ye'd niver have the heart to chate a poor boy like that. All the Saints be praised! I'm a man agin, and not a starvin' machine; and I shall see ye, Mary, mavourneen! but, och, the poor boys that we're lavin'! Hurra! how iver will I ate three males a day, and slape under a blanket, and think of thim on the ground and starvin' by inches!" During the remainder of his stay, Corny balanced between joy and his selfishness in being joyful, in a manner sufficiently ludicrous,--breaking out one moment in the most extravagant demonstration, to be twitched from it the next by a penitential spasm. As for Drake, hardly yet clear of the shadows that haunted his fever, he but mistily comprehended the change that was before him; and it will need weeks and perhaps months of home-nursing and watching before body and mind can win back their former strength and tone. Meanwhile, people of the North, what of the poor boys left behind at Andersonville, starving, as Corny said, by inches, with the winter before them, and their numbers swelled by the hundreds that a late Rebel paper gleefully announces to be on their way from more Northern prisons? DOCTOR JOHNS. VII.