appiness, and hope I shall not be disappointed.
Adieu, my love."

* * * * *

September 30th, 1780, the Hospital Department was newly organized, and
the office of Deputy Director-General was abolished, and of course the
incumbents of that office were no longer in the hospital service.

Dr. Foster's health was irreparably injured by the fatigues and
exposures he had undergone, and he lingered but a few months longer,
dying on the 27th of February, 1781, in his forty-second year.

One sentence in his will deserves record, as in harmony with the
disinterestedness of his life. After desiring that all debts due him
should be collected as soon as possible after his decease, he adds this
clause: "But I would not have any industrious and really poor persons
distressed for this purpose."

The writer of these letters needs no additional eulogy. He sacrificed
all the prospects of his life to give his services in our struggle for
freedom. He, too, was but one of that innumerable multitude who, in
more exalted or in humbler stations, freely gave their exertions, their
wealth, their comfort, and their lives for freedom and right. It is
possible so to linger by the grave of the past as to forget the living
present; but the grateful memory of those who have in their times
contended for truth with self-denial should be ever animating to those
now laboring in the holy warfare, to which, in every age, whether the
outward signs be of peace or strife, God calls the noble of mankind.

"Therefore bring violets! Yet, if we,
self-balked,
Stand still a-strewing violets all the while,
These had as well not moved, ourselves not
talked
Of these."

* * * * *

IN THE PINES.

If I were a crow, or, at least, had the faculty of flying with that
swift directness which is proverbially attributed to the corvine tribe,
and were to wing a southwesterly course from the truck of the flag-staff
which rises from the Battery at New York, I should find myself, within a
very short time, about fifty miles from the turbulent city, and hovering
over a region of country as little like the civilized emporium just
quitted as it is well possible to conceive. Not being a crow, however,
nor fitted up with an apparatus for flying,--destitute even of a
balloon,--I am compelled to adopt the means of locomotion which the
bounty of God or the ingenuity of man affords me, and to