sucks everything into its red vortex for the conflict, so does it drive
everything off in long, diverging rays after the fierce centripetal
forces have met and neutralized each other. For more than a week there
had been sharp fighting all along this road. Through the streets of
Frederick, through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last
the hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the Antietam, the
long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their
path through our fields and villages. The slain of higher condition,
"embalmed" and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their
far homes; the dead of the rank-and-file were being gathered up and
committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for
hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the
neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as I
have said, at every step in the road. It was a pitiable sight, truly
pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that
many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings
more than the sight of this great caravan of maimed pilgrims. The
companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of their
suffering; it was next to impossible to individualize it, and so bring
it home as one can do with a single broken limb or aching wound. Then
they were all of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime of
their strength. Though they tramped so wearily along, yet there was rest
and kind nursing in store for them. These wounds they bore would be the
medals they would show their children and grandchildren by-and-by. Who
would not rather wear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and sympathy.
Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed with fever or
pale with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary
limbs along as if each step would exhaust their slender store of
strength. At the road-side sat or lay others, quite spent with their
journey. Here and there was a house at which the wayfarers would stop,
in the hope, I fear often vain, of getting refreshment; and in one place
was a clear, cool spring, where the little bands of the long procession
halted for a few moments, as the trains that traverse the desert rest by
its fountains. My companions had brought a few peaches along with them,
which the Philanthropist