em, although
their home-friends may be far away. I have encouraged them to be
cheerful, and bear their sufferings with heroic fortitude, trusting in
God, and a happier and better future. It has seemed to me that I do them
some good when I find them watching for my coming, and that every face
brightens as I enter the ward, while many say to me, 'We are always glad
to see you come. It cheers and comforts us mightily to have you come so
bright and smiling, asking us how we do, and saying always some pleasant
word, and giving us something good to read. Then we love to hear you
sing to us. Sometimes it makes the tears come in our eyes, but it kind
o' lifts us up, and makes us feel better. We sometimes wonder you come
here so much among us poor fellows, but we have come to the conclusion
that your heart is in the cause for which we are fighting, and that you
want to help and cheer us so that we may get well and go back to our
regiments, and finish up the work of putting down this infernal
rebellion.'"

"One day as I lifted up the head of a poor boy, who was languidly
drooping, and smoothed and fixed his pillow, he said, 'Thank you; that's
nice. You are so gentle and good to me that I almost fancy I am at home,
and that sister Mary is waiting upon me.'"

"Such expressions of their interest and gratitude," she adds, "encourage
me in this work, and I keep on, though often my strength almost fails
me, and my heart is filled with sadness, as I see one after another of
the poor fellows wasting away, and in a few days their cots are empty
and they sleep the sleep that knows no waking this side of the grave."

Thus she labored on in her work of self-sacrificing love and devotion,
with no compensation but the satisfaction that she was doing good, until
late in the month of December, 1862, she was attacked with the typhoid
fever, which she, no doubt, had contracted in the infected air of the
hospitals, and died on the 14th of January, 1863. During her five weeks
of illness her thoughts were constantly with the soldiers, and in her
delirium she would imagine she was among them in their sick wards, and
would often speak to them words of consolation and sympathy.

In a letter of Rev. Dr. Eliot, the Unitarian Pastor, of St. Louis,
published in the _Christian Register_ on the following May, he gives the
impression she had left upon those with whom she had been sometimes
associated in her labors. Miss Pettes was a Unitarian in her religio