fell
upon my heart also, as from the wing of the Death-Angel, as I wandered
through the woods, meditating upon what I saw. Where were the feet that
wore those empty shoes? Where was he whose proud waist was buckled in
that belt? Some soldier's heart was made happy by that poor, soiled,
tattered, illegible letter, which rain and mildew have not spared; some
mother's, sister's, wife's, or sweetheart's hand, doubtless, penned it;
it is the broken end of a thread which unwinds a whole life-history,
could we but follow it rightly. Where is that soldier now? Did he fall
in the fight, and does his home know him no more? Has the poor wife or
stricken mother wailed long for the answer to that letter, which never
came, and will never come? And this cap, cut in two by a shot, and stiff
with a strange incrustation,--a small cap, a mere boy's, it
seems,--where now the fair head and wavy hair that wore it? O mother and
sisters at home, do you still mourn for your drummer-boy? Has the story
reached you,--how he went into the fight to carry off his wounded
comrades, and so lost his life for their sakes?--for so I imagine the
tale which will never be told.

And what more appalling spectacle is this? In the cover of thick woods,
the unburied remains of two soldiers,--two skeletons side by side, two
skulls almost touching each other, like the cheeks of sleepers! I came
upon them unawares as I picked my way among the scrub oaks. I knew that
scores of such sights could be seen here a few weeks before; but the
United States Government had sent to have its unburied dead collected
together in the two national cemeteries of the Wilderness; and I had
hoped the work was faithfully done.

"They was No'th-Carolinians; that's why they didn't bury 'em," said
Elijah, after a careful examination of the buttons fallen from the
rotted clothing.

The ground where they lay had been fought over repeatedly, and the dead
of both sides had fallen there. The buttons may, therefore, have told a
true story: North-Carolinians they may have been: yet I could not
believe that the true reason why they had not been decently interred. It
must have been that these bodies, and others we found afterwards, were
overlooked by the party sent to construct the cemeteries. It was
shameful negligence, to say the least.

The cemetery was near by,--a little clearing in the woods by the
roadside, thirty yards square, surrounded by a picket-fence, and
comprising seventy trenche