I glanced furtively at the bell-pull, and replied.
“O no; not from that window. You see, that is a back window. The laundress has some clothes hung out to dry just below, and it might injure them. Besides, I am in the habit of doing my leaping from a fourth-story front window. You’ll always find, Thomas, that a man of refinement prefers a leap from a window of the fourth floor.”
He sat awhile, in a sort of thoughtful attitude while I kept one eye on the bell-cord, and the other on him; then, to my relief, he deliberately lay down again, drew the covers close up to his chin, and glided off into a gentle slumber.
I had no more trouble with him. Thomas got well, in the course of a month, left off drinking, and got to be a pretty sensible sort of fellow. The last time I saw him was one day, some months after I had left the hospital, when I returned to the old place on a brief visit. He was engaged in a four-hand game of euchre, and I observed, just as I arrived, that he held in his hand both bowers, ace, king and queen: would you believe it?——he had the temerity to play it “alone,” and the extraordinarily good luck to make “four times.”
CHAPTER IV.
Locked Up.
THE inmates of the hospital were allowed passes, after roll-call in the morning, to go into the city, or whither they pleased; but it was imperative that they should return by half-past seven in the evening, positively, without fail. One morning, as usual, I got a pass to go into the city, and as the Doctor handed it to me, he said:
“Don’t fail to be back at half-past seven.”
“I won’t,” I replied, with the best intentions in the world.
As new patients arrived almost every day, some of whom might be ignorant of the rules and regulations, the Doctor had got into the habit of repeating this injunction every time he gave out a pass; and as he gave, on an average, about one hundred and fifty per day, Sundays excluded, he must, in the course of a year, have said, “Don’t fail to return by half-past seven,” forty-six thousand nine hundred and fifty times.
I had just stepped from the street-car in the heart of the city, when I ran squarely against one of the boys of my own regiment, whom I had not seen since the battle of Antietam.