ike--nay, I may call it weakness--is being talked
about and discussed. And he thought the best way was to say nothing
about the peculiarity or mystery attending my marriage, but merely say I
was a widow. Somebody in Barton said Charles died of a fever, and as
nobody contradicted it, so it has gone; but, Aunt Marian, it is often my
hope, and even belief, that I shall see him again!"

She stopped talking, and hid her face, sobbing heavily, like a grieved
child. Poor thing! I pitied her from my heart. But what could I say?
People are not lost, now-a-days. The difficulty is to be able to hide,
try they ever so much. It looked very dark for this Charles Lunt; and,
by her own account, they had not known much about him. He was a New York
merchant, and I had not much opinion of New York morals myself. From
their own newspapers, I should say there was more wickedness than could
possibly be crammed into their dailies going on as a habit. However, I
said nothing of this sort to poor Percy, whose grief and mortification
had already given her such a look of suffering as belongs only to the
gloomiest experience of life. I soothed and comforted her as well as I
might, and it doesn't always take a similar experience to give
consolation. She said it was a real comfort to tell me about her
trouble, and I dare say it was.

When Colonel Lunt got back from Washington, he had a great deal to tell
us all, which he did, at our next soldiers' meeting, of the good which
the Barton boxes had done. But he said it was a really wonderful sight
to see the amount of relief contributed on that Lord's day, from all
parts of the North, for the wounded. Every train brought in hundreds and
thousands of packages and boxes, filled with comforts and delicacies.
If the boys had been at home, they could not have been cared for more
tenderly and abundantly. And the nurses in the hospitals! Colonel Lunt
couldn't say enough about them. It was a treat to be watched over and
consoled by such ministering angels as these women were! We could
believe that, if they were at all like Anna Ford, who went, she said,
"to help the soldiers bear the pain!" And I know she did that in a
hundred cases,--cases where the men said they should have given up
entirely, if she hadn't held their hands, or their heads, while their
wounds were being dressed. "It made it seem so like their own mother or
sister!"

That fall, I think, Barton put up eighty boxes of blackberry jam. This
wasn