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Trumantia Resource Directory 09
Page 05
Of course, the great palace of Whitehall, where the royal patient was lying, was all in confusion. Attendants were hurrying to and fro. Councils of physicians were deliberating in solemn assemblies on the case, and ordaining prescriptions with the formality which royal etiquette required. The courtiers were thunderstruck and confounded at the prospect of the total revolution which was about to ensue, and in which all their hopes and prospects might be totally ruined. James, the Duke of York, seeing himself about to be suddenly summoned to the throne, was full of eager interest in the preliminary arrangements to secure his safe and ready accession. He was engaged night and day in selecting officers, signing documents, and stationing guards. Catharine mourned in her own sick chamber the approaching blow, which was to separate her forever from her husband, deprive her of her consequence and her rank, and consign her, for the rest of her days to the pains and sorrows, and the dreadful solitude of heart which pertains to widowhood. The king's other female intimates, too, of whom there were three still remaining in his court and in his palace, were distracted with real grief. They may have loved him sincerely; they certainly gave every indication of true affection for him in this his hour of extremity. They could not appear at his bedside except at sudden and stolen interviews, which were quickly terminated by their being required to withdraw; but they hovered near with anxious inquiries, or else mourned in their apartments with bitter grief. Without the palace the effects were scarcely less decisive. The tidings spread every where throughout the kingdom, arresting universal attention, and awakening an anxiety so widely diffused and so intense as almost to amount to a terror. A Catholic monarch was about to ascend the throne, and no one knew what national calamities were impending.
True, I did not let my men suspect that I was very ill. After a few minutes I struggled up once more under my heavy load and asked the men to come along. I had been seized with such a violent attack of fever that my strength seemed to have vanished all of a sudden, my limbs quivering in a most alarming way. I carried a clinical thermometer on my person. My temperature was 104 deg. F. From ten o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon the attack of fever was so acute that several times I fell down. My men, who were in a pitiable condition that day, collapsed, now one, now another, although their loads were less than half the weight of mine, each man carrying about 40 lb. We marched until four o'clock that afternoon, but only covered a distance of 6 kil. in that entire day. Two of the men had abandoned their loads altogether, as they could not carry them any farther. What vexed me considerably was that they had discarded my valuable things in preference to leaving the great weight of rubbish of their own which they insisted on carrying, such as looking-glasses, combs, brushes, a number of old clothes in shreds, and the heavy hammocks, which weighed not less than 20 lb. each.
That there is a close likeness between all these bodies is obvious from the fact that when any of them is strongly heated, or allowed to putrefy, it gives off the same sort of disagreeable smell; and careful chemical analysis has shown that they are, in fact, all composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, combined in very nearly the same proportions. Indeed, charcoal, which is impure carbon, might be obtained by strongly heating either a handful of corn, or a piece of fowl's flesh, in a vessel from which the air is excluded so as to keep the corn or the flesh from burning. And if the vessel were a still, so that the products of this destructive distillation, as it is called, could be condensed and collected, we should find water and ammonia, in some shape or other, in the receiver. Now ammonia is a compound of the elementary bodies, nitrogen and hydrogen; therefore both nitrogen and hydrogen must have been contained in the bodies from which it is derived.
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