facilities embraced in its system
of special relief, giving a list of all Homes and Lodges, and telling
how to secure back pay for soldiers, on furlough or discharged,
bounties, pensions, etc., etc. Bound up with this, is a choice
collection of hymns, adapted to the soldier's use, the whole forming a
neat little volume of convenient size for the pocket.

The manuscript was submitted to the committee, accepted, and one hundred
thousand copies ordered to be printed for gratuitous distribution in all
the hospitals and camps. The "Soldiers' Friend," as it was called, was
soon distributed in the different departments and posts of the army, and
was even found in the Southern hospitals and prisons, while it was the
pocket companion of men in the trenches, as well as of those in quarters
and hospital. Many thousands were instructed by this little directory,
where to find the lodges, homes and pension offices of the Commission,
and were guarded against imposture and loss. So urgent was the demand
for it, and so useful was it, that the committee ordered a second
edition.

Perhaps no work published by the Sanitary Commission has been of more
real and practical use than this little volume, or has had so large a
circulation. It was the last public work performed for the Commission by
Mrs. Parrish. At the close of the war her labors did not end; but
transferring her efforts to the amelioration of the condition of the
freedmen, she still found herself actively engaged in a work growing
directly out of the war.

MRS. ANNIE WITTENMEYER

Mrs. Annie Wittenmeyer, who, during the early part of the war was widely
known as the State Sanitary Agent of Iowa, and afterward as the
originator of the Diet Kitchens, which being attached to hospitals
proved of the greatest benefit as an adjunct of the medical treatment,
was at the outbreak of the rebellion, residing in quiet seclusion at
Keokuk. With the menace of armed treason to the safety of her country's
institutions, she felt all her patriotic instincts and sentiments
arousing to activity. She laid aside her favorite intellectual pursuits,
and prepared herself to do what a woman might in the emergency which
called into existence a great army, and taxed the Government far beyond
its immediate ability in the matter of Hospital Supplies and the proper
provision for, and care of the sick and wounded.

Early in 1861 rumors of the sufferings of the volunteer soldiery, called
so suddenly