ing the patients
must be cold; but they were used to camp life, and did not complain. The
men who watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One
of them was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw one poor
fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was labored,
and he was tossing, anxious and restless. The men were debating about
the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I happened there at
the right moment to see that he was well narcotized for the night. Was
it possible that my Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these
places? Certainly possible, but not probable; but as the lantern was
held over each bed, it was with a kind of thrill that I looked upon the
features it illuminated. Many times as I went from hospital to hospital
in my wanderings, I started as some faint resemblance,-the shade of a
young man's hair, the outline of his half-turned face,--recalled the
presence I was in search of. The face would turn towards me, and the
momentary illusion would pass away, but still the fancy clung to me.
There was no figure huddled up on its rude couch, none stretched at the
roadside, none toiling languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in
car or in ambulance, that I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that
for which I was making my pilgrimage to the battlefield.

"There are two wounded Secesh," said my companion. I walked to the
bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember
right, from North Carolina. He was of good family, son of a judge in
one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle,
intelligent. One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying helpless
and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards
those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in
deadly strife. The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this
Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race
in the men of the North and South. It would be worth a year of battles
to abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped
it out were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of
slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully
among the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man
finished in the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his
forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous con