As I walked through one of the wards, a little later, I said, in passing, “You are better to-day,” to a man who had been suffering from such a severe attack of erysipelas in his head, that his eyes had been closed for many days. The enormous swelling of his head, added to his long, matted beard and thick, tangled black hair, had given him a fierce, brigand sort of air, which was far from being dissipated by the appearance of a pair of large black eyes, opened to-day for the first time since I had seen him in the hospital.
“Better,” said he; “but oh, lady!—”
He turned his head away, shaking it sadly.
“What is your grief?” said I, sitting down beside him.
“My little ones, my little ones! Where are they? Five weeks, dear lady, have I lain here, and no word have I had from them.”
A long, and most sorrowful story followed, of which the main points are these: a Spaniard by birth, he had come to this country in search of employment, settled in Philadelphia, married, and for several years was prosperous and happy, till his wife fell into bad habits, wasted his earnings, and brought them to utter poverty and wretchedness. On one occasion he had gone to a neighboring town on business, and on his return found their comfortable home broken up, the house and furniture sold, and his wife and their three little ones in a poor hovel, in one of the worst parts of the city.
No one who did not hear him, can imagine the pathos with which he described his little girl’s illness, with all the fervor of his warm Spanish nature; his care of her; his walking the floor with her night after night, her little arm around his neck and her head upon his breast; “for you see, lady, it was worse than if she had had no mother.” His love for her seemed to amount to a passion; his boys, he said, were “nice little fellows,” Juan and Henriquez; but evidently his feeling for them was nothing in comparison with the idolatry lavished upon his little Rosita, as he called her, a child of four years old.
“I lie here at night,” said he, the large tears rolling down his cheeks, “and think if I could just once have that little hand in mine, that little head upon my breast, it would cure me faster than all this doctor’s stuff, far away faster.”
From what he told me, I gathered that he had enlisted in the war in despair; and during his absence his wife, for her outrageous conduct, had been considered insane, and taken to the insane department of the almshouse, where she then was, the children having been taken to board by a woman in the neighborhood of their house. He had been unable, as he had said, to hear anything about them, and feared they were ill, especially his darling Rosita.
“Lady, dear lady, could you, would you see about them for me?”