to the last degree of emaciation, crippled and dying from frost and
gangrene, many of them idiotic from their sufferings, or with the
fierce fever of typhus, more deadly than sword or minie bullet, raging
in their veins, were brought to Annapolis and to Wilmington, and
unmindful of the deadly infection, gentle and tender women ministered to
them as faithfully and lovingly, as if they were their own brothers.
Ever and anon, in these works of mercy, one of these fair ministrants
died a martyr to her faithfulness, asking, often only, to be buried
beside her "boys," but the work never ceased while there was a soldier
to be nursed. Nor were these the only fields in which noble service was
rendered to humanity by the women of our time. In the larger
associations of our cities, day after day, and year after year, women
served in summer's heat and winter's cold, at their desks, corresponding
with auxiliary aid societies, taking account of goods received for
sanitary supplies, re-packing and shipping them to the points where they
were needed, inditing and sending out circulars appealing for aid, in
work more prosaic but equally needful and patriotic with that performed
in the hospitals; and throughout every village and hamlet in the
country, women were toiling, contriving, submitting to privation,
performing unusual and severe labors, all for the soldiers. In the
general hospitals of the cities and larger towns, the labors of the
special diet kitchen, and of the hospital nurse were performed steadily,
faithfully, and uncomplainingly, though there also, ever and anon, some
fair toiler laid down her life in the service. There were many too in
still other fields of labor, who showed their love for their country;
the faithful women who, in the Philadelphia Refreshment Saloons, fed the
hungry soldier on his way to or from the battle-field, till in the
aggregate, they had dispensed nearly eight hundred thousand meals, and
had cared for thousands of sick and wounded; the matrons of the
Soldiers' Homes, Lodges, and Rests; the heroic souls who devoted
themselves to the noble work of raising a nation of bondmen to
intelligence and freedom; those who attempted the still more hopeless
task of rousing the blunted intellect and cultivating the moral nature
of the degraded and abject poor whites; and those who in circumstances
of the greatest peril, manifested their fearless and undying attachment
to their country and its flag; all these were e