energy, unflagging perseverance, and unwavering purpose,
who foresaw its inevitable coming and was prepared for it.

Almira Fales was no longer young. She had spent a life in doing good,
and was ready to commence another. Her husband had employment under the
government in some department of the civil service, her sons entered the
army, and she, too,--a soldier, in one sense, as truly as they--since
she helped and cheered on the fight.

From that December day that commenced the work, until long after the war
closed, she gave herself to it, heart and soul--mind and body. No one,
perhaps, can tell her story of work and hardship in detail, not even
herself, for she acts rather than talks or writes. "Such women, always
doing, never think of pausing to tell their own stories, which, indeed,
can never be told; yet the hint of them can be given, to stir in the
hearts of other women a purer emulation, and to prove to them that the
surest way to happiness is to serve others and forget yourself."

In detail we have only this brief record of what she has done, yet what
volumes it contains, what a history of labor and of self-sacrifice!

"After a life spent in benevolence, it was in December, 1860, that
Almira Fales began to prepare lint and hospital stores for the soldiers
of the Union, not one of whom had then been called to take up arms.
People laughed, of course; thought it a 'freak;' said that none of these
things would ever be needed. Just as the venerable Dr. Mott said, at the
women's meeting in Cooper Institute, after Sumter had been fired: 'Go
on, ladies! Get your lint ready, if it will do your dear hearts any
good, though I don't believe myself that it will ever be needed.' Since
that December Mrs. Fales has emptied over seven thousand boxes of
hospital stores, and distributed with her own hands over one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars worth of comforts to sick and wounded soldiers.
Besides, she supplied personally between sixty and seventy forts with
reading matter. She was months at sea--the only woman on hospital ships
nursing the wounded and dying men. She was at Corinth, and at Pittsburg
Landing, serving our men in storm and darkness. She was at Fair Oaks.
She was under fire through the seven days' fight on the Peninsula, with
almost breaking heart ministering on those bloody fields to 'the saddest
creatures that she ever saw.'

"Through all those years, _every day_, she gave her life, her strength,
her nursing