melodious and interminable recitative:

An' I hope to gain de prommis' lan',
Yaas I do,
'Deed I do.
Lor' I hope to gain de prommis' lan',
Dat I do,
An' dar I'll flap ma wings an' take ma stan',
Yaas I will,
'Deed I will,
An' I'll tune ma harp an' jine de Shinin' Ban'
Glory, Glory,
I hope to gain de prommis' lan'!

And over and over the same shouted melody, interrupted only by an
outburst of reproach for his mules.

They drove back through a road which had become for miles only a
great muddy lane running between military encampments, halted at
every bridge and crossroads to exhibit their passes; they passed
never-ending trains of army waggons cither stalled or rumbling
slowly toward Alexandria. Everywhere were soldiers, drilling,
marching, cutting wood, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning arms,
mending, working on camp ditches, drains, or forts, writing letters
at the edge of shelter tents, digging graves,
skylarking--everywhere the earth was covered with them.

They passed the camp for new recruits, where the poor "fresh fish"
awaited orders to join regiments in the field to which they had
been assigned; they passed the camp for stragglers and captured
deserters; the camp for paroled prisoners; the evil-smelling
convalescent camp, which, still under Surgeon General Hammond's
Department, had not yet been inspected by the Sanitary Commission.

An officer, riding their way, talked with them about conditions in
this camp, where, he said, the convalescents slept on the bare
ground, rain or shine; where there were but three surgeons for the
thousands suffering from intestinal and throat and lung troubles,
destitute, squalid, unwarmed by fires, unwashed, wretched, forsaken
by the government that called them to its standard.

It was the first of that sort of thing that Ailsa and Letty had
seen.

After the battles in the West--particularly after the fall of Fort
Donnelson--terrible rumours were current in the Army of the Potomac
and in the hospitals concerning the plight of the wounded--of new
regiments that had been sent into action with not a single medical
officer, or, for that matter, an ounce of medicine, or of lint in
its chests.

They were grisly rumours. In the neat wards of the Farm Hospital,
with its freshly swept and sprinkled floors, its cots in rows, its
detailed soldier nurses and the two nurses from Sainte Ursula's
Sisterhood, its sick-diet department, its medica