causing one to conjure up
romantic visions of guarded forts, sudden surprises, and daring deeds;
for in these war times the hum drum life of Yankeedom had vanished, and
the most prosaic feel some thrill of that excitement which stirs the
nation's heart, and makes its capital a camp of hospitals. Wandering up
and down these lower halls, I often heard cries from above, steps
hurrying to and fro, saw surgeons passing up, or men coming down
carrying a stretcher, where lay a long white figure, whose face was
shrouded and whose fight was done. Sometimes I stopped to watch the
passers in the street, the moonlight shining on the spire opposite, or
the gleam of some vessel floating, like a white-winged sea-gull, down
the broad Potomac, whose fullest flow can never wash away the red stain
of the land.

The night whose events I have a fancy to record, opened with a little
comedy, and closed with a great tragedy; for a virtuous and useful life
untimely ended is always tragical to those who see not as God sees. My
headquarters were beside the bed of a New Jersey boy, crazed by the
horrors of that dreadful Saturday. A slight wound in the knee brought
him there; but his mind had suffered more than his body; some string of
that delicate machine was over strained, and, for days, he had been
reliving in imagination, the scenes he could not forget, till his
distress broke out in incoherent ravings, pitiful to hear. As I sat by
him, endeavoring to soothe his poor distracted brain by the constant
touch of wet hands over his hot forehead, he lay cheering his comrades
on, hurrying them back, then counting them as they fell around him,
often clutching my arm, to drag me from the vicinity of a bursting
shell, or covering up his head to screen himself from a shower of shot;
his face brilliant with fever; his eyes restless; his head never still;
every muscle strained and rigid; while an incessant stream of defiant
shouts, whispered warnings, and broken laments, poured from his lips
with that forceful bewilderment which makes such wanderings so hard to
overhear.

It was past eleven, and my patient was slowly wearying himself into
fitful intervals of quietude, when, in one of these pauses, a curious
sound arrested my attention. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a
one-legged phantom hopping nimbly down the room; and, going to meet it,
recognized a certain Pennsylvania gentleman, whose wound-fever had
taken a turn for the worse, and, depriving him o