er-stricken men. She
encourages them to confide to her their sorrows and troubles, and the
heart that, like the caged bird, has been bruising itself against the
bars of its cage, from grief for the suffering or sorrow of the loved
ones at home or oftener still, the soul that finds itself on the
confines of an unknown hereafter, and is filled with distress at the
thought of the world to come, pours into her attentive ear, the story of
its sorrows, and finds in her a wise and kind counsellor and friend, and
learns from her gentle teachings to trust and hope.

Hers was a truly heroic spirit. Darkness, storm, or contagion, had no
terrors for her, when there was suffering to be alleviated, or anguish
to be soothed. Amid the raging storms of the severe winter of 1862-3,
she often left her tent two or three times in the night and went round
to the beds of those who were apparently near death, from the fear that
the nurses might neglect something which needed to be done for them.
When diphtheria raged in the hospital, and the nurses fearing its
contagious character, fled from the bed-sides of those suffering from
it, Mrs. Husband devoted herself to them night and day, fearless of the
exposure, and where they died of the terrible disease received and
forwarded to their friends the messages of the dying.

It is no matter of surprise that when the time came for her to leave
this hospital, where she had manifested such faithful and
self-sacrificing care and tenderness for those whom she knew only as the
defenders of her country, those whom she left, albeit unused to the
melting mood, should have wept at losing such a friend. "There were no
dry eyes in that hospital," says one who was himself one of its inmates;
"all, from the strong man ready again to enter the ranks to the poor
wreck of humanity lying on his death-bed gave evidence of their love for
her, and sorrow at her departure in copious tears." On her way home she
stopped for an hour or two at camps A and B in Frederick, Maryland,
where a considerable number of the convalescents from Antietam had been
sent, and these on discovering her, surrounded her ambulance and greeted
her most heartily, seeming almost wild with joy at seeing their kind
friend once more. After a brief stay at Philadelphia, during which she
visited the hospitals almost constantly, she hastened again to the
front, and at Falmouth early in 1863, after that fearful and disastrous
battle of Fredericksburg sh