e straw and
dry material of the building. The crisped and blackened limbs, heads and
other portions of bodies lying half consumed among the heaps of ruins
and ashes, made up one of the most ghastly pictures ever witnessed, even
on the field of battle. But we passed these direful scenes to meet with
others of less shocking but still sad character. Every house and barn
from Gettysburgh to Fairfield was a hospital; and about most of the
large barns, numbers of dilapidated hospital tents served to increase
the accommodations for the wounded.

All of the worst cases were left in these hospitals, the number being
estimated, by the rebel surgeons in charge, at no less than fifteen
thousand. Never had we witnessed such sad scenes as we were passing
through to-day. The confederate surgeons were doing what they could for
their wounded, but they were destitute of medicines and surgical
appliances, and even food sufficient to supply those in their charge. At
one of these barns some of our officers stopped, and as they passed
among the gray-clad sufferers who were lying in rows upon the barn
floors, one, a boy apparently not more than sixteen years of age,
attracted the notice of one of the company, a surgeon. The lad looked
more like a delicate girl than a soldier; his hair fell from his fair
forehead in long flaxen curls upon his pillow of straw, some of them
matted with blood; his cheek was rosy, and his soft white hand told of a
youth spent amid more tender scenes than those of the camp. A piece of
linen laid across his face covered a ghastly wound where a ball had
passed through his face, and had torn both his eyes from their sockets.

The surgeon spoke a kind word to the youth, who stretched out his hand,
saying, "Come near me, I want to touch you." The doctor stooped over
him, and the boy, pressing his hand in his own, said, "You are a friend,
are you not?" "Yes, I am a friend to all the unfortunate." "But are you
not a confederate?" "No." The boy clung to the hand of the surgeon in
silence for a moment, and then said slowly, "I did not think a federal
would speak so kindly to me; your voice sounds like that of a friend,
and your hand feels like one; will you not stay with me?" When the other
told him that he must follow his command, he replied: "Oh! I shall never
hear any one speak so kindly to me again; my mother lives in North
Carolina, but she will not see me. Can you not stay?" The doctor was far
from being a rebel symp