arrived, she
returned to the front, and was with the Army as a voluntary Special
Relief agent, through all its changes of position on and about the
Rapidan, at the affair of Mine Run, the retreat and pursuit to Bristow
Station, and the other movements prior to General Grant's assumption of
the chief command. In the winter of 1864, she made a short visit home,
and the Legislature voted an appropriation of a considerable sum of
money to be placed at her disposal, to be expended at her discretion for
the comfort and succor of Maine soldiers.

At the opening of the great Campaign of May, 1864, she hastened to Belle
Plain and Fredericksburg, and there, in company with scores of other
faithful and earnest workers, toiled night and day to relieve so far as
possible the indescribable suffering which filled that desolated city.
After two or three weeks, she went forward to Port Royal, to White
House, and finally to City Point, where, in connection with Mrs. Eaton
of the Maine Camp Hospital Association, she succeeded in bringing one of
the Hospitals up to the highest point of efficiency. This accomplished,
she returned to Maine, and was engaged in stimulating the women of her
State to more effective labors, when she received the intelligence that
her son who had been in the Army of the Shenandoah, had been mortally
wounded at the battle of Cedar-Run.

With all a mother's anxieties aroused, she abandoned her work in Maine,
and hastened to Martinsburg, Virginia, to ascertain what was really her
son's fate. Here she met a friend, one of the delegates of the Christian
Commission, and learned from him, that her son had indeed been badly
wounded, and had been obliged to undergo the amputation of one leg, but
had borne the operation well, and after a few days had been transferred
to a Baltimore Hospital. To that city she hastened, and greatly to her
joy, found him doing well. Anxiety and over exertion soon prostrated her
own health, and she was laid upon a sick bed for a month or more.

In November, her health being measurably restored, she returned to
Washington, and asked to be assigned to duty by the Christian
Commission. She was directed to report to Mrs. Annie Wittenmeyer, who
was the Commission's Agent for the establishment of Special Diet
Kitchens in the Hospitals. Mrs. Wittenmeyer assigned her a position in
charge of the Special Diet Kitchen, on one of the large hospital-boats
plying between Louisville and Nashville. While on