record. -Sir William de Lancey, who was Quartermaster-General, was struck
early in the day of Waterloo by a spent cannon-ball and knocked from his horse. Late in the next day he was found still alive, and removed to a house in the neighbourhood. There his wife, whom he had married a few weeks before, nursed him with devoted care till his death. She wrote this account of her experiences for her brother, Captain Basil Hall. She had been told that be was dead, and this was the common belief ; then came the news that he lived, with a great revulsion of feeling from sorrow to joy ; and finally there was the long watch, hope gradually giving way to the conviction that death must be the end.• All this is told with perfect simplicity, and makes such a narrative as has seldom been written. Captain Basil Hall showed it to Sir Walter Scott and to Charles Dickens. The latter wrote : "I never saw anything so real, so touching, so actually present before my eyes. I am husband and wife, dead man and living woman, Emma [the wife's most helpful maid] and General Dundas, doctor and bedstead, everything and everybody, all in one." As for the doctors, they did their worst. They seem to have had no notion of any treatment beyond bleeding and leeches. They did not even discover, or attempt to discover, the nature of the injuries.
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