Arad Barrows, and Corresponding Secretary, Mr.
Fales, of the Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, took good care of that
part of the work, and Mr. W. M. Cooper and his associates did the same
for the Cooper Shop Saloon.

[Footnote M: Mr. Bazilla S. Brown]

Ample provision was made to give the regiments the benefit of a bath and
an ample repast at whatever hour of day or night they might come into
the city. In the four and a half years of their labors, the Volunteer
Refreshment Saloon fed between eight hundred thousand and nine hundred
thousand soldiers and expended about one hundred thousand dollars in
money, aside from supplies. The Cooper Shop Saloon, closing a little
earlier, fed about four hundred thousand men and expended nearly seventy
thousand dollars. Both Saloons had hospitals attached to them for sick
and wounded soldiers. The Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon had, during
the war, nearly fifteen thousand patients, the Cooper Shop, perhaps half
that number.

But noble and patriotic as were the labors of the men connected with
these Saloons, they were less deserving of the highest meed of praise
than those of the women who, with a patience and fidelity which has
never been surpassed, winter and summer, in cold and heat, at all hours
of night as well as in the day, at the boom of the signal gun, hastened
to the Refreshment Saloons and prepared those ample repasts which made
Philadelphia the Mecca to which every soldier turned longingly during
his years of Army life. These women were for the most part in the middle
and humbler walks of life; they were accustomed to care for their own
households, and do their own work; and it required no small degree of
self-denial and patriotic zeal on their part, after a day of the
housekeeper's never ending toil, to rise from their beds at midnight
(for the trains bringing soldiers came oftener at night than in the day
time), and go through the darkness or storm, a considerable distance,
and toil until after sunrise at the prosaic work of cooking and
dish-washing.

Of some of these noble women we have the material for brief sketches,
and we know of none more deserving a place in our record.

MRS. ELIZA G. PLUMMER was a native of Philadelphia, of revolutionary
stock, born in 1812, and had been a widow for nearly twenty-five years.
Though possessed of but little property, she had for many years been the
friend and helper of the poor, attending them in sickness, and from her