woman, no longer ennuyed by the emptiness and frivolity
of life, found her thoughts and hands alike fully occupied, and rose
into a sphere of life and action, of which, a month before, she would
have considered herself incapable.

Saratoga and Newport, and the other haunts of fashion were not indeed
deserted, but the visitors there were mostly new faces, the wives and
daughters of those who had grown rich through the contracts and
vicissitudes of the war, while their old habitues were toiling amid the
summer's heat to provide supplies for the hospitals, superintending
sanitary fairs, or watching and aiding the sick and wounded soldiers in
the hospitals, or at the front of the army. In these labors of love,
many a fair face grew pale, many a light dancing step became slow and
feeble, and ever and anon the light went out of eyes, that but a little
while before had flashed and glowed in conscious beauty and pride. But
though the cheeks might grow pale, the step feeble, and the eyes dim,
there was a holier and more transcendent beauty about them than in their
gayest hours. "We looked daily," says one who was herself a participant
in this blessed work, in speaking of one who, after years of
self-sacrificing devotion, at last laid down her young life in patriotic
toil, "we looked daily to see the halo surround her head, for it seemed
as if God would not suffer so pure and saintly a soul to walk the earth
without a visible manifestation of his love for her." Work so ennobling,
not only elevated and etherealized the mind and soul, but it glorified
the body, and many times it shed a glory and beauty over the plainest
faces, somewhat akin to that which transfigured the Jewish lawgiver,
when he came down from the Mount. But it has done more than this. The
soul once ennobled by participation in a great and glorious work, can
never again be satisfied to come down to the heartlessness, the
frivolities, the petty jealousies, and littlenesses of a life of
fashion. Its aspirations and sympathies lie otherwheres, and it must
seek in some sphere of humanitarian activity or Christian usefulness,
for work that will gratify its longings.

How pitiful and mean must the brightest of earth's gay assemblages
appear, to her who, day after day, has held converse with the souls of
the departing, as they plumed their wings for the flight heavenward, and
accompanying them in their upward journey so far as mortals may, has
been privileged with some g