e found ample employment for her active and
energetic nature. As matron of Humphreys' Division Hospital (Fifth
Corps) she was constantly engaged in ministering to the comfort of the
wounded, and her solicitude for the welfare and prosperity of the men
did not end with their discharge from the hospital. The informalities or
blunders by which they too often lost their pay and were sometimes set
down as deserters attracted her attention, and so far as possible she
always procured the correction of those errors. Early in April, 1863,
she made a flying visit to Philadelphia, and thus details in a letter to
a friend, at the time the kind and amount of labor which almost always
filled up every hour of those journeys. "Left Monday evening for home,
took two discharged soldiers with me; heard that I could not get a pass
to return; so instead of going directly through, stayed in Washington
twenty-four hours, and fought a battle for a pass. I came off conqueror
of course, but not until wearied almost to death--my boys in the
meantime had gotten their pay--so I took them from the Commission Lodge
(where I had taken them on arriving) to the cars, and off for Baltimore.
There I placed them in the care of one of the gentlemen of the Relief
Associations, and arrived home at 1.30 A. M. I carried money home for
some of the boys, and had business of my own to attend to, keeping me
constantly going on Wednesday and Thursday; left at midnight (Thursday
night) for Washington, took the morning boat and arrived here this
afternoon." This record of five days of severe labor such as few men
could have gone through without utter prostration, is narrated in her
letter to her friend evidently without a thought that there was anything
extraordinary in it; yet it was in a constant succession of labors as
wearing as this that she lived for full three years of her army life.

Immediately after the battles of Chancellorsville she went to United
States Ford, but was not allowed to cross, and joined two Maine ladies
at the hospital on the north side of the Rappahannock, where they
dressed wounds until dark, slept in an ambulance, and early in the
morning went to work again, but were soon warned to leave, as it was
supposed that the house used as a hospital would be shelled. They left,
and about half a mile farther on found the hospital of the Third and
Eleventh Corps. Here the surgeon in charge urged Mrs. Husband to remain
and assist him, promising her tra