After a few days I was allowed to rise from bed, to which, in my own opinion, there had never been necessity for keeping me.  I was not, however, permitted to go out of doors.  The result of the doctors’ deliberations was a strict injunction upon my father to take me to the South every winter, a decision due, perhaps, to the fact that my father had landed interests in South Carolina.  At any rate, my father soon took me to Charleston, where I was again put to school.  Doubtless I was thus relieved of much annoyance, as my new schoolmates received me without showing the curiosity which would have irritated me in my own village.

More than five months passed before my memory entirely returned to me.  The change was gradual.  One day, at the morning recess, a group of boys were talking about the Mexican War.  The Palmetto regiment had distinguished itself in battle.  I heard a big boy say, “Yes, your Uncle Pierce is all right, and his regiment is the best in the army.”  I felt a glow of pride at this praise of my people—­as I supposed it to be.  More talk followed, however, in which it became clear that the boys were not speaking of Franklin Pierce and his New Hampshire men, and I was greatly puzzled.

A few days afterward the city was in mourning; Colonel Pierce M. Butler, the brave commander of the South Carolina regiment, had fallen on the field of Churubusco.

Now, I cannot explain, even to myself, what relation had been disturbed by this event, but I know that from this time I began to collect, vaguely at first, the incidents of my whole former life; so that, when my father sent for me at the summer vacation, I had entirely recovered my lost memory.  I even knew everything that had happened in the recent interval, so that my consciousness held an uninterrupted chain of all past events of importance.  And now I realized with wonder one of the marvellous compensations of nature.  My brain reproduced form, size, colour—­any quality of a material thing seen in the hiatus, so vividly that the actual object seemed present to my senses, while I could feel dimly, what I now know more thoroughly, that my memory during the interval had operated weakly, if at all, on matters speculative, so called—­questions of doubtful import, questions of a kind upon which there might well be more than one opinion, being as nothing to my mind.  Although I have truly said that I cannot explain how it was that my mind began its recovery, yet I cannot reason away the belief that the first step was an act of sensitive pride—­the realization that it made some difference to me whether the New Hampshire regiment or the Palmetto regiment acquired the greater glory.

My father continued to send me each winter to Charleston, and my summers were spent at home.  By the time I was fifteen he became dissatisfied with my progress, and decided that I should return to the South for the winter of 1853-4. and that if there should be no recurrence of my mental peculiarity he would thereafter put me in the hands of a private tutor who should prepare me for college.