other government boat
coming down loaded with stores, tied the boats together and burned them,
setting the crew of each adrift in their own yawl, and nobody knew it
till they reached Memphis, two hours later. Being able to hear nothing
of the wounded, we pushed on to Helena, ninety miles below, and here
dangers thickened. We saw the guerrillas burning cotton, with our own
eyes, along the shore, we saw their little skiffs hid away among the
bushes on the shore; and just before we got to Helena, had a most narrow
escape from their clutches. A signal to land on the river was in
ordinary times never disregarded, as the way business of freight and
passengers was the chief profit often of the trip, and it seems hard for
pilots and captains always to be on their guard against a decoy. At this
landing the signal was given, all as it should be, and we were just
rounding to, when, with a sudden jerk, the boat swung round into the
stream again. The mistake was discovered in time, by a government
officer on board, and we escaped an ambush. Just think! we might have
been prisoners in Mississippi now, but God meant better things for us
than that."

Her tender heart was moved by the sufferings of the wretched colored
people at Helena. She says, "But oh! the contrabands! my heart did ache
for them. Such wretched, uncared-for, sad-looking creatures I never saw.
They come in such swarms that it is impossible to do anything for them,
unless benevolent people take the thing into their hands. They have a
little settlement in one end of the town, and the government furnishes
them rations, but they cannot all get work, even if they were all able
and willing to do it; then they get sick from exposure, and now the
small pox is making terrible havoc among them. They have a hospital of
their own, and one of our Union Aid ladies has gone down to superintend
it, and get it into some order, but it seems as if there was nothing
before them but suffering for many a long day to come, and that sad, sad
truth came back to me so often as I went about among them, that no
people ever gained their freedom without a baptism of fire."

Miss Breckinridge returned to St. Louis on a small hospital-boat on
which there were one hundred and sixty patients in care of herself and
one other lady. A few extracts from one of her letters will show what
brave work it gave her to do.

"It was on Sunday morning, 25th of January, that Mrs. C. and I went on
board the hospit