shington King, Mrs. Charles L. Ely, Mrs. F. F. Maltby, Mrs. C. N.
Barker, Miss Susan J. Bell, Miss Eliza S. Glover, and Miss Eliza Page,
were indefatigable in their labors for the soldiers.

This Society was from the beginning, active and efficient. It conducted
its business with great ability and system, and in every direction made
itself felt as a power for good throughout the Mississippi Valley. Its
officers visited for a considerable period, fourteen hospitals in the
city and vicinity, and were known in the streets by the baskets they
carried. Of one of these baskets the recording Secretary, Miss Adams,
gives us an interesting inventory in one of her reports: "Within was a
bottle of cream, a home-made loaf, fresh eggs, fruit and oysters; stowed
away in a corner was a flannel shirt, a sling, a pair of spectacles, a
flask of cologne; a convalescent had asked for a lively book, and the
lively book was in the basket; there was a dressing-gown for one, and a
white muslin handkerchief for another; and paper, envelopes and stamps
for all."

The Christian Commission made the ladies of the Society their agents for
the distribution of religious reading, and they scattered among the men
one hundred and twenty-five thousand pages of tracts, and twenty
thousand books and papers.

The Ladies' Union Aid Society, sent delegates to all the earlier
battle-fields, as well as to the camps and trenches about Vicksburg, and
these ladies returned upon the hospital steamers, pursuing their heroic
work, toiling early and late, imperilling in many cases their health,
and even their lives, in the midst of the trying and terrible scenes
which surrounded them. During the fall and winter of 1862-3, the
Society's rooms were open day and evening, for the purpose of
bandage-rolling, so great was the demand for supplies of this kind.

Amid their other labors, they were not unmindful of the distress which
the families of the soldiers were suffering. So great was the demand for
hospital clothing, that they could not supply it alone, and they
expended five thousand five hundred dollars received for the purpose
from the Western Sanitary Commission, in paying for the labor on
seventy-five thousand garments for the hospitals. The Medical Purveyor,
learning of their success, offered the Aid Society a large contract for
army work. They accepted it, and prepared the work at their rooms, and
gave out one hundred and twenty-eight thousand articles to be mad