fessional nurse, on one side, and with the thin cheeks and silver
hair of Mrs. Barstow on the other, as they stood together at the rear
door of the last car. "Good-by! good-by!" called the school-girls in
tears, and the ladies of the Aid Society gave a shrill little feminine
cheer. They were away.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"When we remember how they died--
In dark ravine and on the mountain-side,...
How their dear lives were spent
By lone lagoons and streams,
In the weary hospital tent,...
....it seems
Ignoble to be alive!"

--THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

The three nurses travelled southward by railway, steamboat, and wagon.
On the evening of the third day they came to the first hospital, having
been met at the river by an escort, and safely guided across a country
fair with summer and peaceful to the eye, but harassed by constant
skirmishing--the guerrilla warfare that desolated that border during the
entire war. The houses they passed looked home-like and quiet; if the
horses had been stolen and the barns pillaged, at least nothing of it
appeared in the warm sunshine of the still August day. At the door of
the hospital they were welcomed cordially, and within the hour they were
at work, Anne timidly, the others energetically. Mary Crane had the
worst cases; then followed Mrs. Barstow. To Anne was given what was
called the light work; none of her patients were in danger. The men here
had all been stricken down by fever; there were no wounded. During the
next day and evening, however, stories began to come to the little post,
brought by the country people, that a battle had been fought farther up
the valley toward the mountains, and that Hospital Number Two was filled
with wounded men, many of them lying on the hard floor because there
were not beds enough, unattended and suffering because there were no
nurses. Anne, who had worked ardently all day, chafing and rebelling in
spirit at the sight of suffering which could have been soothed by a few
of the common luxuries abundant in almost every house in Weston, felt
herself first awed, then chilled, by this picture of far worse agony
beyond, whose details were pitilessly painted in the plain rough words
of the country people. She went to the door and looked up the valley.
The river wound slowly along, broad, yellow, and shining; it came from
the mountains, but from where she stood she could see only round-topped