sted by Uncle Ben and
Aunt Easter, toiled in the stifling kitchen, preparing dainties which she
had long denied herself. At evening she went to the station at Fourteenth
Street with her father, and stood amongst the people, pressed back by the
soldiers, until the trains came in. Alas, the heavy basket which the
Colonel carried on his arm was brought home again. The first hundred to
arrive, ten hours in a hot car without food or water, were laid groaning
on the bottom of great furniture vans, and carted to the new House of
Refuge Hospital, two miles to the south of the city.

The next day many good women went there, Rebel and Union alike, to have
their hearts wrung. The new and cheap building standing in the hot sun
reeked with white wash and paint. The miserable men lay on the hard
floor, still in the matted clothes they had worn in battle. Those were
the first days of the war, when the wages of our passions first came to
appal us. Many of the wounds had not been tended since they were dressed
on the field weeks before.

Mrs. Colfax went too, with the Colonel and her niece, although she
declared repeatedly that she could not go through with such an ordeal.
She spoke the truth, for Mr. Carvel had to assist her to the
waiting-room. Then he went back to the improvised wards to find Virginia
busy over a gaunt Arkansan of Price's army, whose pitiful, fever-glazed
eyes were following her every motion. His frontiersman's clothes, stained
with blackened blood, hung limp over his wasted body. At Virginia's
bidding the Colonel ran downstairs for a bucket of fresh water, and she
washed the caked dust from his face and hands. It was Mr. Brinsmade who
got the surgeon to dress the man's wound, and to prescribe some of the
broth from Virginia's basket. For the first time since the war began
something of happiness entered her breast.

It was Mr. Brinsmade who was everywhere that day, answering the questions
of distracted mothers and fathers and sisters who thronged the place;
consulting with the surgeons; helping the few who knew how to work in
placing mattresses under the worst cases; or again he might have been
seen seated on the bare floor with a pad on his knee, taking down the
names of dear ones in distant states,--that he might spend his night
writing to them.

They put a mattress under the Arkansan. Virginia did not leave him until
he had fallen asleep, and a smile of peace was come upon his sunken face.
Dismayed at the fear