s a
volume of Autograph Leaves of American Authors from this patient. On the
blank page was written:--

"---- ---- ----:--I owe you a better memento, but here is
one that I know your good taste will appreciate.

"I met you first in my delirium; and knew you only in the
purest and sweetest character a woman can exhibit,--a true
and faithful Florence Nightingale, supporting and
encouraging the weary, bathing the feverish brow of the
brave soldier dying far from other friends.

"I never can forget, and I trust you never will, how you
night and day kept watch over me when wife and father were
yet far away, when fever and delirium were racking my brain
and sapping life from my lungs,--how you bore with every
impatience of mine, or kindly answered every severe word.

"Please accept this book from

"Your devoted friend,

"---- ---- ---- ----."

There was a general commotion and eager haste in the hospital the day
before the Ninth Army Corps left. The convalescents assured the doctors
of their ability to go, but the doctors, differing in opinion, made many
a brave man unhappy. One old soldier, John Paul, chief saddler of the
Third Division of the Corps, insisted stoutly on the necessity of his
joining his command. If the whole success of the undertaking had rested
upon his shoulders, he could not have felt the responsibility more. At
the last moment he was allowed to go.

All were ambitious to share the glory of the coming triumph, little
dreaming of the terrible cost of life and limb with which it was to be
achieved. Of those who went from the hospital, numbers were stricken
down, never to need care again. How sadly the words "Shot through the
head" looked opposite the name of Frank Wagner, in the first lists which
came from the front! He was a spirited boy of seventeen, who by great
care had been raised from a dangerous illness. But almost sadder than
the death-lists were the names of those taken prisoners. We had learned
but too well that it would be death in the end to most; to very few life
worth having.

Back to the hospital, too, came letters, telling of long marches and
hard fighting; and of the amount of sickness which would be kept off,
and pain and misery saved, if there were two or three hundred Miss ----s
down there. The wounded might be counted, the letters said, by tens of
thousands; the Ninth Army Corps had earned imperishab