om the other men, and one said:

"A purse for her! She's got more money than all of us, I bet!"

Another called out: "No, we won't! Won't do anything of the kind!
We're your boys; ain't we, mother? You're not working for money!"

"Why," persisted the generous man, "we made up a purse of eighty dollars
for a woman t' other time I was hurt, and she hadn't done half as much
for us!"

"Eighty dollars!" called out the man who thought me rich; "eighty
dollars for her! why I tell you she could give every one of us eighty
dollars, and would not miss it!"

Another said:

"She isn't one of the sort that are 'round after purses!"

Why any of them should have thought me rich I cannot imagine except for
the respect with which officers treated me. To veil the iron hand I held
over my nurses, I made a jest of my authority, pinned a bit of bandage
on my shoulder, and played commander-in-chief. Officers and guards would
salute when we passed, as an innocent joke, but the men came to regard
me as a person of rank.

Citizens of Fredericksburg, who at first insulted me on the street, as
they did other Yankee nurses, heard that I was a person of great
influence, and began to solicit my good offices on behalf of friends
arrested by order of Secretary Stanton, and held as hostages, for our
sixty wounded who were made prisoners while trying to pass through the
city, before we took possession.

So I was decked in plumes of fictitious greatness, and might have played
princess in disguise if I had had time; but I had only two deaths in the
old theater--this man up stairs, and the man without clothes, who lay
alone in that back room, and after the amputation of his thigh, had no
covering until government gave him one of Virginia clay.

CHAPTER LXXII.

MORE VICTIMS AND A CHANGE OF BASE.

One day at noon, the air thrilled with martial music and the earth shook
under the tramp of men as seven thousand splendid troops marched up
Princess Ann street on their way to reinforce our army, whose rear was
about eight miles from us. They were in superb order, and the forts
around Washington had been stripped of their garrisons, and most of
their guns, to furnish them; but the generalship which cut our army off
from its base of supplies, and blundered into the battle of the
Wilderness, like a blind horse into a briar patch, without shelling or
burning the dry chapperal in which our dead and wounded were consumed
together, after the battle,