I asked how it happened that this one part of his face was clean, when all the rest was dirty; and they told me, my boy, that it was the place where his poor old mother had kissed him at parting.
Lively Mike's first symptom of his dreadful malady was a feeling of overwhelming weariness, as though he had been for a long time in one spot doing nothing. The feeling deepened into sullen, dangerous madness, until it was finally unsafe to let him go at large, as he had several times attempted to shoot scouting Confederacies.
The next hopeless patient was Big-nose Jake. Born at the commencement of his career in the Sixth Ward, and weighing ninety-four pounds without his knapsack, Big-nose had always enjoyed good health, with the exception of starvation; but was in the habit of muttering to himself that Strategy was a great humbug, and he'd rather die at home in his bunk in the engine-house than in a swamp, without a single fire in six months. His only way of keeping warm was by occasionally huddling up to a Confederate picket, and receiving his fire.
No. 3 was Baby Jim, a resident of the Sixth Ward for many years, and weighing ninety-one pounds. His first attack of his malady came in the shape of an incoherent and irrepressible desire to get up a Directory
of Army Names, so that the families of Mackerels in the Army of Accomac might know where their relatives were, and how old they had got to be. Sometimes he would be suddenly seized with the absurd notion that the General of the Mackerel Brigade was killing more men by strategy than would be slain in fifty battles.
Another hapless maniac was Cross-eyed Tom. His family is well known in the Sixth Ward; weight, ninety-seven pounds. Always enjoyed excellent health, until one day, when it suddenly struck him—uncalled-for, as it were—that he hadn't seen the Colonel of his regiment for six months. The demon of insanity tempted him to believe that his Colonel had all along been drinking bad gin and threatening to resign, in Washington, instead of staying with his men and getting acquainted with them. He knew that he must be entirely mistaken about this, but couldn't shake off the horrible delusion.
A fifth lunatic was the Worth street Chicken. Had voted several times a day in the Sixth Ward, and weighed ninety-nine pounds. The Chicken could not say that he was really a sick man; but had moments when he could not resist the malignant temptation to imagine, that the celebrated Southern Confederacy was just as even with us now as it was a year ago, with several majestic raids for small trumps. At times he was troubled with bad dreams about all the Treasury Notes becoming worthless if the General of the Mackerel Brigade went into winter quarters.
And so the Insanitary Committee went down the whole line, my boy, closely questioning the poor chaps
who had lost their reason, and eliciting continued proofs of the national ravages of Insanity.
"Truly," says the chief Insanitary chap, cleaning his nails with his jack-knife; "truly these unhappy beings are hopelessly deranged, and must be sent to the Asylum. Their ravings are beyond all precedent."