l
disposition; but I call it martyrdom of the domestic circle. Life for
life. Blood for blood. Substitution!

Or perhaps the mother lingers long enough to see a son get on the
wrong road, and his former kindness becomes rough reply when she
expresses anxiety about him. But she goes right on, looking carefully
after his apparel, remembering his every birthday with some memento,
and when he is brought home worn out with dissipation, nurses him till
he gets well and starts him again, and hopes, and expects, and prays,
and counsels, and suffers, until her strength gives out and she fails.
She is going, and attendants, bending over her pillow, ask her if she
has any message to leave, and she makes great effort to say something,
but out of three or four minutes of indistinct utterance they can
catch but three words: "My poor boy!" The simple fact is she died for
him. Life for life. Substitution!

About twenty-four years ago there went forth from our homes hundreds
of thousands of men to do battle for their country. All the poetry of
war soon vanished, and left them nothing but the terrible prose. They
waded knee-deep in mud. They slept in snow-banks. They marched till
their cut feet tracked the earth. They were swindled out of their
honest rations, and lived on meat not fit for a dog. They had jaws all
fractured, and eyes extinguished, and limbs shot away. Thousands of
them cried for water as they lay dying on the field the night after
the battle, and got it not. They were homesick, and received no
message from their loved ones. They died in barns, in bushes, in
ditches, the buzzards of the summer heat the only attendants on their
obsequies. No one but the infinite God who knows everything, knows the
ten thousandth part of the length, and breadth, and depth, and height
of anguish of the Northern and Southern battlefields. Why did these
fathers leave their children and go to the front, and why did these
young men, postponing the marriage-day, start out into the
probabilities of never coming back? For the country they died. Life
for life. Blood for blood. Substitution!

But we need not go so far. What is that monument in Greenwood? It is
to the doctors who fell in the Southern epidemics. Why go? Were there
not enough sick to be attended in these Northern latitudes? Oh, yes;
but the doctor puts a few medical books in his valise, and some vials
of medicine, and leaves his patients here in the hands of other
physicians, and ta