I continued till Candlemas following, lingering of the wound I had received by the broadsword. My surgeon was the son of the same Dr. Irvin who first got me into the guards; but having unfortunately neglected to tie a string to the tent of green cloth, which he used for the wound, the tent slipped into my body, where it lay under my navel seven months and five days, and exceedingly pained me, not suffering me to sleep otherwise than by taking soporiferous pills. When the tent was first missing, neither the surgeon nor any body else ever imagined that it was lodged in my body, but supposed it to have slipped out of the wound while I slept, and carried away by some rat, or other vermin: the tent lying thus in my body, made it impossible that the wound could heal: wherefore, after lingering seven months, by the advice of a gentlewoman in the neighbourhood, I got leave to go for Ireland with my surgeon, and there try whether my native air would contribute any thing to my cure.
However insignificant this relation may be to the generality of readers, yet I cannot omit a lucky accident to which I owe my cure. While I continued at Edinburgh, I ordered some pipes of lead to be made in a mold, through which the thin corruption, which continually issued out of the wound caused by the tent remaining in my body, might be conveyed as through a faucet. These pipes I cut shorter by degrees, in proportion as I imagined the wound was healing at the bottom; till at last, by mistaking the true cause, the tent continuing still where it did, the pipes became too short for the use intended; wherefore, when I was in Ireland, I made a coarse pipe myself, which was long enough: this pipe, after the
wound
