d us to glance
along the beds. It came from one in the corner--such a little bed!--and
such a tearful little face looked up at us, as we stopped beside it!
The twelve years old drummer boy was not singing now, but sobbing, with
a manly effort all the while to stifle the distressful sounds that
would break out.

"What is it, Teddy?" I asked, as he rubbed the tears away, and checked
himself in the middle of a great sob to answer plaintively:

"I've got a chill, ma'am, but I ain't cryin' for that, 'cause I'm used
to it. I dreamed Kit was here, and when I waked up he wasn't, and I
couldn't help it, then."

The boy came in with the rest, and the man who was taken dead from the
ambulance was the Kit he mourned. Well he might; for, when the wounded
were brought from Fredericksburg, the child lay in one of the camps
thereabout, and this good friend, though sorely hurt himself, would not
leave him to the exposure and neglect of such a time and place; but,
wrapping him in his own blanket, carried him in his arms to the
transport, tended him during the passage, and only yielded up his
charge when Death met him at the door of the hospital which promised
care and comfort for the boy. For ten days, Teddy had shivered or
burned with fever and ague, pining the while for Kit, and refusing to
be comforted, because he had not been able to thank him for the
generous protection, which, perhaps, had cost the giver's life. The
vivid dream had wrung the childish heart with a fresh pang, and when I
tried the solace fitted for his years, the remorseful fear that haunted
him found vent in a fresh burst of tears, as he looked at the wasted
hands I was endeavoring to warm:

"Oh! if I'd only been as thin when Kit carried me as I am now, maybe he
wouldn't have died; but I was heavy, he was hurt worser than we knew,
and so it killed him; and I didn't see him, to say good bye."

This thought had troubled him in secret; and my assurances that his
friend would probably have died at all events, hardly assuaged the
bitterness of his regretful grief.

At this juncture, the delirious man began to shout; the one-legged rose
up in his bed, as if preparing for another dart, Teddy bewailed himself
more piteously than before: and if ever a woman was at her wit's end,
that distracted female was Nurse Periwinkle, during the space of two or
three minutes, as she vibrated between the three beds, like an agitated
pendulum. Like a most opportune reinforcement, D