d speaking words of cheer
and comfort, those who knew her then all well remember. The work at once
became delightful and profitable to her, calling her mind away from its
own sorrows to the physical suffering of those around her. In her
eagerness to soothe their woes, she half forgot her own, and came to
them always with a joyous smile and words of cheerful consolation.
During her stay in St. Louis her home was at the hospitable mansion of
George Partridge, Esq., an esteemed member of the Western Sanitary
Commission, whose household seem to have vied with each other in
attention and kindness to their guest.

Hearing of great suffering at Cape Girardeau, she went there about the
1st of August, just as the First Wisconsin Cavalry were returning from
their terrible expedition through the swamps of Arkansas. She had last
seen them in all their pride and manly beauty, reviewed by her husband,
the Governor, before they left their State. Now how changed! The
strongest, they that could stand, just tottering about, the very shadows
of their former selves. The building taken as a temporary hospital, was
filled to overflowing, and the surgeons were without hospital supplies,
the men subsisting on the common army ration alone. The heat was
oppressive, and the diseases of the most fearfully contagious character.
The surgeons themselves were appalled, and the attendants shrank from
the care of the sick and the removal of the dead. In one room she found
a corpse which had evidently lain for many hours, the nurses fearing to
go near and see if the man was dead. With her own hands she bound up the
face, and emboldened by her coolness, the burial party were induced to
coffin the body and remove it from the house. Here was a field for
self-forgetfulness and heroic devotion to a holy cause; and here the
light of woman's sympathy shone brightly when all else was fear and
gloom. Patients dying with the noxious camp fever breathed into her ear
their last messages to loved ones at home, as she passed from cot to
cot, undaunted by the bolts of death which fell around her thick as on
the battle-field. She set herself to work procuring furloughs for such
as were able to travel, and discharges for the permanently disabled, to
get them away from a place of death. To this end she brought all the
art of woman to work. Once convinced that the object she sought was just
and right, she left no honorable means untried to secure it. Surgeons
were flattere