the men pleasant reading, how she sat by their bed-sides
speaking words of cheer and sympathy, and singing songs of country,
home, and heaven, with a voice of angelic sweetness. Nor, how after
having by her own exertions procured melodeons for the hospital chapels,
she would play for the soldiers in their Sabbath worship, and bring her
friends to make a choir to assist in their religious services.

Slender in form, her countenance radiant with intelligence, and her dark
eyes beaming with sympathy and kindness, it was indeed a pleasant
surprise to see one so young and delicate, going about from hospital to
hospital to find opportunities of doing good to the wan and suffering,
and crippled heroes, who had been brought from hard-fought battle-fields
to be cared for at the North.

But no one of the true Sisters of Mercy, who gave themselves to this
service during the war, felt more intense and genuine satisfaction in
her labors than she, and not one is more worthy of our grateful
remembrance, now that she has passed away from the scene of her joys and
her labors forever.

Mary Dwight Pettes was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in the year 1841,
and belonged to a family who were eminent for their intelligence, and
religious and moral worth. The circumstances of her early life and
education are unknown to the writer of this sketch, but must have been
such as to develop that purity of mind and manners, that sweetness and
amiability of temper, that ready sympathy and disinterestedness of
purpose and conduct, which, together with rare conversational and
musical powers, she possessed in so high a degree.

Having an uncle and his family resident in St. Louis, the first year of
the war found her in that city, engaged in the work of ministering to
the soldiers in the hospitals with her whole heart and soul. During the
first winter of the great rebellion (1862) St. Louis was filled with
troops, and there were thirteen hospitals thronged with the sick and
wounded from the early battle-fields of the war. On the 30th of January
of that year she thus wrote to the Boston _Transcript_, over her own
initials, some account of her labors and observations at that time.
Speaking of the hospitals she said, "It is here that the evils and
horrors of the war become very apparent. Here stout hearts are broken.
You see great numbers of the brave young men of the Western States, who
have left their homes to fight for their country. They were willing