y
her varied and trying experiences, she felt the necessity of engaging in
some employment, by which she could maintain herself, and aid her aged
father, and accepted an appointment in one of the Government
departments, where she labors assiduously for twelve hours daily. Her
army experiences have not robbed her of that charming modesty and
diffidence of demeanor, which are so attractive in a woman, or made her
boastful of her adventures. To these she seldom alludes, and never in
such a way as to indicate that she thinks herself in the least a
heroine.

DELPHINE P. BAKER

Though her attentions and efforts have had a specific direction widely
different, for the most part, from those of the majority of the American
women, who have devoted themselves to the cause of the country and its
defenders, few have been more actively and energetically employed, or
perhaps more usefully, than the subject of the following sketch. To her
efforts, persistent, untiring, self-sacrificing, almost entirely does
the Nation owe the organization of the National Military Asylum--a home
for the maimed and permanently disabled veterans who gave themselves to
the cause which has so signally triumphed.

Delphine P. Baker was born in Bethlehem, Grafton County, New Hampshire,
in the year 1828, and she resided in New England during her early youth.
Her father was a respectable mechanic of good family, an honest,
intellectual, industrious man, of sterling principle and a good member
of society. Her mother possessed a large self-acquired culture, a mind
of uncommon scope, and a vivid and powerful imagination. She was in a
large degree capable of influencing the minds of others, and was endowed
with a natural power of leadership.

These qualities and traits of both parents we find remarkably developed
in the daughter, and to them is doubtless largely due the successful
achievement of the great object of her later labors. A feeling, from
some cause always cherished by her mother, until it became an actual
belief, that her child was destined to an extraordinary career, was so
impressed upon her daughter's mind, and inwrought with her higher being
as to become a controlling impulse. It is easy, in tracing the history
of Miss Baker, to mark the influence of this fixed idea in every act of
her life.

For some years previous to the breaking out of the war, Miss Baker had
devoted herself to the inculcation of proper ideas of the sphere and
cultur