rprised and moved to admiration by the
regeneration of the women of our land. A month ago, and we saw a large
class, aspiring only to be 'leaders of fashion,' and belles of the
ball-room, their deepest anxiety clustering about the fear that the
gored skirts, and bell-shaped hoops of the spring mode might not be
becoming, and their highest happiness being found in shopping, polking,
and the schottisch--pretty, petted, useless, expensive butterflies,
whose future husbands and children were to be pitied and prayed for. But
to-day, we find them lopping off superfluities, retrenching
expenditures, deaf to the calls of pleasure, or the mandates of fashion,
swept by the incoming patriotism of the time to the loftiest height of
womanhood, willing to do, to bear, or to suffer for the beloved country.
The riven fetters of caste and conventionality have dropped at their
feet, and they sit together, patrician and plebeian, Catholic and
Protestant, and make garments for the poorly-clad soldiery. An order
came to Boston for five thousand shirts for the Massachusetts troops at
the South. Every church in the city sent a delegation of needle-women to
'Union Hall,' a former aristocratic ball-room of Boston; the Catholic
priest detailed five hundred sewing-girls to the pious work; suburban
towns rang the bell to muster the seamstresses; the patrician Protestant
of Beacon Street ran the sewing-machine, while the plebeian Irish
Catholic of Broad Street basted--and the shirts were done at the rate of
a thousand a day. On Thursday, Miss Dix sent an order for five hundred
shirts for the hospital at Washington--on Friday they were ready. And
this is but one instance, in one city, similar events transpiring in
every other large city.

"But the patriotism of the Northern women has been developed in a nobler
and more touching manner. We can easily understand how men, catching the
contagion of war, fired with enthusiasm, led on by the inspiriting
trains of martial music, and feeling their quarrel to be just, can march
to the cannon's mouth, where the iron hail rains thickest, and the ranks
are mowed down like grain in harvest. But for women to send forth their
husbands, sons and brothers to the horrid chances of war, bidding them
go with many a tearful 'good-by' and 'God bless you,' to see them,
perhaps, no more--this calls for another sort of heroism. Only women can
understand the fierce struggle, and exquisite suffering this sacrifice
involves--a