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I heard this case talked over more than once by my brother, and one or two professional friends of his who came often to the house. Nobody was ready to believe that Mr. Whiston had seen an apparition; but the truth always remained that the man’s nerves were so shocked by what he believed to be the appearance of a ghost, that he had become the prey of a monomania, and had by little and little grown incapable of distinguishing between real things and the creations and projections of his own unsteady brain. Il s’ecoutait vivre, as the French phrase has it; and, having nothing to live for but this, it was well that life was over for him. I suppose the acute disease of which he died met with little resistance, for he looked so ill when we first saw him; but it would have been sadder if he had lingered a few more years, so miserable as he was,–hardly fit either for the inside of an asylum or the outside,–to die at last without money or friends to give him the last of this world’s comforts, perhaps without mind enough left to miss them.

Strangely enough, some months after this, when it was spring, my brother found Dunster at the Marine Hospital in Chelsea, where he had gone with another surgeon to see a curious operation in which he felt a great interest. He was walking through the accident ward when somebody called him from one of the cots,–a wretched-looking vagabond, whom at first he did not recognize. But it was Dunster, and he tried to put on something of his old manner, which made him seem like a wretched copy of his former self.

Jack made him give an account of himself. It seemed that he had been thrown among the dead in that battle when he was supposed to have been killed; but he had recovered his senses, and crawled from the place where he had fallen farther into the enemy’s lines, and he had been sent to the rear. He had nearly died from the effects of his wounds, and it was evident that he had been very intemperate. He had drifted to New Orleans, and lead a most wretched life there; and at times he had gone to sea. My brother asked him if he was ever in Rio; and at first he denied it, and afterward confessed that he was there once, and had seen Whiston in a boat, and had dropped over the side in the dark to evade him, but when Jack questioned him about being at the window, he denied it utterly. He said his ship sailed that day. It might have been that he meant to commit a robbery, or that he really told the truth, and that it was the first of poor Whiston’s illusions. Of course it was possible that Dunster might have swung himself down from the flat roof by a rope, and they might have really met at other times, it was not unlikely. But one can hardly conceive of Mr. Whiston’s perfect certainty, in such a case, that the glimpse he had of his cousin’s face was a supernatural vision.

My brother said, “I did not tell him what wreck and ruin he had made unconsciously of Whiston’s life,–at least the part he had played in it; it would do no good, and indeed he is hardly sane, I think. It would be curious if they had both inherited from their common ancestry the mental weakness which shows itself so differently in the two lives,–Whiston’s, so cowardly and shrinking and weak; and Dunster’s, so horribly low and brutal. There is not much the matter with him, he had a fall on board ship. The nurse told me he was very troublesome, and had fairly insulted the chaplain, who had said a kind word to him. It is a pity that shot had not killed him; and I suppose most of the class who ever think of him will say he was a hero, and died on the field of honor.”

And my brother and I talked gravely about the two men. God help us! what sin and crime may be charged to any of us who take the wrong way in life! The possibilities of wickedness and goodness in us are both unlimited. I said, how many lives must be like these which seemed such wretched failures and imperfections! One cannot help having a great pity for such men, in whom common courage, and the power of resistance, and the ordinary amount of will seem to have been wanting. Warped and incapable, or brutal and shameful, one cannot pity them enough. It is like the gnarled and worthless fruit that grows among the fair and well-rounded,–the useless growth that is despised and thrown away scornfully.

But God must always know what blighted and hindered any life or growth of His; and let us believe that He sometimes saves and pities what we have scorned and blamed.