they were with the best
appliances, must have been almost incredibly great.

Here as elsewhere Miss Gilson soon made a favorable impression on the
wounded men. They looked up to her, reverenced and almost worshipped
her. She had their entire confidence and respect. Even the roughest of
them yielded to her influence and obeyed her wishes, which were always
made known in a gentle manner and in a voice peculiarly low and sweet.

It has been recorded by one who knew her well, that she once stepped out
of her tent, before which a group of brutal men were fiercely
quarrelling, having refused, with oaths and vile language, to carry a
sick comrade to the hospital at the request of one of the male agents of
the Commission, and quietly advancing to their midst, renewed the
request as her own. Immediately every angry tone was stilled. Their
voices were lowered, and modulated respectfully. Their oaths ceased, and
quietly and cheerfully, without a word of objection, they lifted their
helpless burden, and tenderly carried him away.

At the same time she was as efficient in action as in influence. Without
bustle, and with unmoved calmness, she would superintend the preparation
of food for a thousand men, and assist in feeding them herself. Just so
she moved amidst the flying bullets upon the field, bringing succor to
the wounded; or through the hospitals amidst the pestilent air of the
fever-stricken wards. Self-controlled, she could control others, and
order and symmetry sprung up before her as a natural result of the
operation of a well-balanced mind.

In all her journeys Miss Gilson made use of the opportunities afforded
her wherever she stopped to plead the cause of the soldier to the
people, who readily assembled at her suggestion. She thus stimulated
energies that might otherwise have flagged, and helped to swell the
supplies continually pouring in to the depots of the Sanitary
Commission. But Miss Gilson's crowning work was performed during that
last protracted campaign of General Grant from the Rapidan to Petersburg
and the Appomattox, a campaign which by almost a year of constant
fighting finished the most terrible and destructive war of modern times.
She had taken the field with Mr. Fay at the very commencement of the
campaign, and had been indefatigable in her efforts to relieve what she
could of the fearful suffering of those destructive battles of May,
1864, in which the dead and wounded were numbered by scores of
tho