permission to take passage in her, advised me
not to risk returning to shore. So, reluctantly, I resigned my pony,
endeared to me by a hundred adventures, and directly I was floating down
the James, with the white teams and the tattered groups of men, receding
from me, and each moment the guns of Malvern Hills growing fainter.
Away! praised be a merciful God! away from the accursed din, and terror,
and agony, of my second campaign,--away forever from the Chickahominy.

For awhile I sat meditatively in the bow of the boat, full of strange
perplexities and thankfulness. I had escaped the bullet, and fever, and
captivity, and a great success in my profession was about to be accorded
to me, but there was much work yet to be done. The rough material I had
for a grand account of the closing of the campaign; but these
fragmentary figures and notes must be wrought into narrative, and to
avail myself of their full significance, I must lose no moment of
application. I found that I was one of four correspondents on board, and
we resolved to district the boat, each correspondent taking one fourth
of the names of the sick and wounded. The spacious saloons, the clean
deck, the stairways, the gangways, the hold, the halls,--all were filled
with victims. They lay in rows upon straw beds, they limped feverishly
here and there; some were crazed from sunstroke, or gashes; and one man
that I remember counted the rivets in the boilers over the whole hundred
miles of the journey, while another,--a teamster,--whipped and cursed
his horses as if he had mistaken the motion of the boat for that of his
vehicle.

The _Daniel Webster_ was one of a series of transports supplied for the
uses of the wounded by a national committee of private citizens. Her
wood work was shining and glossy, her steel shone like mirrors, and she
was cool as Paradise. Out of the smoke, and turmoil, and suffocation of
battle these wretched men had emerged, to enjoy the blessedness,
unappreciated before, of shelter, and free air and cleanliness. There
was ice in abundance on board, and savory lemonade lay glassily around
in great buckets. Women flitted from group to group with jellies,
_bonbons_, cigars, and oranges, and the grateful eyes of the prostrate
people might have melted one to tears. These women were enthusiasts of
all ages and degrees, who proffered themselves, at the beginning of the
war, as stewardesses and nurses. From the fact that some of them were of
masc