, her mother-love to our soldiers. For her to be a soldier's
nurse meant something very different from wearing a white apron, a white
cap, sitting by a moaning soldier's bed, looking pretty. It meant days
and nights of untiring toil; it meant the lowliest office, the most
menial service; it meant the renouncing of all personal comfort, the
sharing of her last possession with the soldier of her country; it meant
patience, and watching, and unalterable love. A mother, every boy who
fought for his country was _her_ boy; and if she had nursed him in
infancy, she could not have cared for him with a tenderer care. Journey
after journey this woman has performed to every part of the land,
carrying with her some wounded, convalescing soldier, bearing him to
some strange cottage that she never saw before, to the pale, weeping
woman within, saying to her with smiling face, 'I have brought back
_your_ boy. Wipe your eyes, and take care of him.' Then, with a
fantastic motion, tripping away as if she were not tired at all, and had
done nothing more than run across the street. Thousands of heroes on
earth and in heaven gratefully remember this woman's loving care to them
in the extremity of anguish. The war ended, her work does not cease.
Every day you may find her, with her heavily-laden basket, in hovels of
white and black, which dainty and delicate ladies would not dare to
enter. No wounds are so loathsome, no disease so contagious, no human
being so abject, that she shrinks from contact; if she can minister to
their necessity."

During the Peninsular campaign Mrs. Fales was engaged on board the
Hospital Transports, during most of the trying season of 1862. She was
at Harrison's Landing in care of the wounded and wearied men worn down
by the incessant battles and hard marches which attended the "change of
base" from the Chickahominy to the James. She spent a considerable time
in the hospitals at Fortress Monroe; and was active in her ministrations
upon the fields in the battles of Centreville, Chantilly, and the second
battle of Bull Run, indeed most of those of Pope's campaign in Virginia
in the autumn of 1862.

At the battle of Chancellorsville, or rather at the assault upon Marye's
Heights, in that fierce assault of Sedgwick's gallant Sixth Corps on the
works which had on the preceding December defied the repeated charges of
Burnside's best troops, Mrs. Fales lost a son. About one-third of the
attacking force were killed or bad