70 
it some fourteen years agone, from which] draw 
inferences that I would turn (o ace count ina memo+ 
randum. vel 
A young officer was in one ‘of the centre wards 
convalescent from a fever. The pearly suffusion of 
returning health was lighting up his countenance, 
pale and sunken as it was. His disorder had ren- 
dered it necessary that his head should be shared, 
and he sat propped in his chair in night-gown and 
night-cap, in the mid-t of that fresh airy enjoyment 
of the sea breeze, so especially a circumstance of the 
Port Royal hospital, andin which it has an advan- 
taze unequalled in any hospital beside that I have 
visited. By the invalid on his table sat a small 
Sapajou monkey, with all the solemn interest of a 
friend in the concerns of the sick: he attended on 
the officer, smoothed thewrinkles of his table cloth, 
and waited for his spoon and basin. An interest 
seemed mingled in all the emotions of the master, 
with arsusement in the officiousness of this kind and 
quality of a servant. He invited us to accept the 
caresses of his aitendant monkey, assuring us he was 
gentle and we need not feel alarm at his familiarity. 
Now it seemed to me that this kind of attraction 
of the sick-mind from the morbid sensations of lone: 
liness and the regretful recollections of separation 
from home and friends, was an important aid to 
nealth. The attention was fixed on things, neither 
eye-sore, nor heart-sickening ; and it strikes me that 
among such men as sailors, by whom shore allure- 
ments, are eagerly seized and intensely enjoyed, living 
objects suggesting the interest of natural history 
Fe  ediad 
