men condemned
by their wounds to stay in Gettysburg, and obliged to live on what the
empty town could provide. There was a colonel in a shoe-shop, a captain
just up the street, and a private round the corner whose young sister
had possessed herself of him, overcoming the military rules in some way,
and carrying him off to a little room, all by himself, where I found her
doing her best with very little. She came afterward to our tent and got
for him clean clothes, and good food, and all he wanted, and was
perfectly happy in being his cook, washerwoman, medical cadet, and
nurse. Besides such as these, we occasionally carried from our supplies
something to the churches, which were filled with sick and wounded, and
where men were dying,--men whose strong patience it was very hard to
bear,--dying with thoughts of the old home far away, saying, as last
words, for the women watching there and waiting with a patience equal in
its strength, 'Tell her I love her.'

"Late one afternoon, too late for the cars, a train of ambulances
arrived at our Lodge with over one hundred wounded rebels, to be cared
for through the night. Only one among them seemed too weak and faint to
take anything. He was badly hurt, and failing. I went to him after his
wound was dressed, and found him lying on his blanket stretched over the
straw,--a fair-haired, blue-eyed young lieutenant, with a face innocent
enough for one of our own New England boys. I could not think of him as
a rebel; he was too near heaven for that. He wanted nothing,--had not
been willing to eat for days, his comrades said; but I coaxed him to try
a little milk gruel, made nicely with lemon and brandy; and one of the
satisfactions of our three weeks is the remembrance of the empty cup I
took away afterward, and his perfect enjoyment of that supper. 'It was
_so_ good, the best thing he had had since he was wounded,'--and he
thanked me so much, and talked about his 'good supper' for hours. Poor
fellow, he had had no care, and it was a surprise and pleasure to find
himself thought of; so, in a pleased, childlike way, he talked about it
till midnight, the attendant told me, as long as he spoke of anything;
for at midnight the change came, and from that time he only thought of
the old days before he was a soldier, when he sang hymns in his father's
church. He sang them now again in a clear, sweet voice. 'Lord, have
mercy upon me;' and then songs without words--a sort of low intoning.
His f