circle around a black exhorter.
Religion to them was a real thing; and so their worship had the beauty
of sincerity, while I ought to add that it was not marked by that
grotesque extravagance sometimes attributed to it. One cannot but think
better of the whole race after the experience of such a Sabbath. The
only drawback to your satisfaction is, that they die quicker and from
less cause than the whites. They have not the same stubborn hopefulness
and hilarity. Why, indeed, should they have?

Speaking of the white soldiers, everybody who goes into their hospitals
is happily disappointed,--you see so much order and cheerfulness, and so
little evidence of pain and misery. The soldier is quite as much a hero
in the hospital as on the battle-field. Give him anything to be cheerful
about, and he will improve the opportunity. You see men who have lost an
arm or a leg, or whose heads have been bruised almost out of likeness to
humanity, as jolly as they can be over little comforts and pleasures
which ordinary eyes can hardly see with a magnifying-glass. So it
happens that a camp of six thousand sick and wounded, which seems at a
distance a concentration of human misery that you cannot bear to behold,
when near does not look half so lugubrious as you expected; and you are
tempted to accuse the sick men of having entered into a conspiracy to
look unnaturally happy.

If you go back now six or thirteen miles to the field hospitals, you
find nothing essentially different. The system and its practical
workings are the same. But it is a perpetual astonishment to find that
here, near to the banks of a river that has not a respectable village on
its shores from Fortress Monroe to Richmond,--here, in a houseless and
desolate land which can be reached only by roads which are intersected
by gullies, which plunge into sloughs of despond, which lose themselves
in the ridges of what were once cornfields, or meander amid stumps of
what so lately stood a forest,--that here you have every comfort for the
sick: all needed articles of clothing, the shirts and drawers, the socks
and slippers; and all the delicacies, too, the farinas, the jellies, the
canned meats and fruits, the concentrated milk, the palatable drinks and
stimulants, and even fresh fruits and vegetables. And in such profusion,
too! I asked the chief agent of the Commission in the Ninth Corps how
many orders he filled in a day. "Look for yourself." I took down the
orders; and the