dress, as if appealing to her to listen, while he
opened his heart about the mother, wife, or sister far away. I have seen
her in her sober gray flannel gown, sitting motionless by the dim
candle-light,--which was all our camp could afford,--with her eyes open
and watchful, and her hands ever ready for all those endless wants of
sickness at night, especially sickness that may be tended unto death, or
unto the awful struggle between life and death, which it was the lot of
nearly all of us at some time to keep watch over until the danger had
gone by. And in sadder trials, when the life of a soldier whom she had
watched and ministered to was trembling in the balance between earth and
heaven, waiting for Him to make all things new, she has seemed, by some
special grace of the Spirit, to reach the living Christ, and draw a
blessing down as the shining way was opened to the tomb. And I have seen
such looks of gratitude from weary eyes, now brightened by visions of
heavenly glory, the last of many recognitions of her ministry. Absorbed
in her work, unconscious of the spiritual beauty which invested her
daily life,--whether in her kitchen, in the heat and overcrowding
incident to the issues of a large special diet list, or sitting at the
cot of some poor lonely soldier, whispering of the higher realities of
another world,--she was always the same presence of grace and love, of
peace and benediction. I have been with her in the wards when the men
have craved some simple religious services,--the reading of Scripture,
the repetition of a psalm, the singing of a hymn, or the offering of a
prayer,--and invariably the men were melted to tears by the touching
simplicity of her eloquence.

"These were the tokens of her ministry among the sickest men; but it was
not here alone that her influence was felt in the hospital. Was there
jealousy in the kitchen, her quick penetration detected the cause, and
in her gentle way harmony was restored; was there profanity among the
convalescents, her daily presence and kindly admonition or reproof, with
an occasional glance which spoke her sorrow for such sin, were enough to
check the evil; or was there hardship or discontent, the knowledge that
she was sharing the discomfort too, was enough to compel patient
endurance until a remedy could be provided. And so, through all the war,
from the seven days' conflict upon the Peninsula, in those early July
days of 1862, through the campaigns of Antietam an