d farm road across the fields, guarded by
gates which now hung wide open. Through these the supply waggons
and the Commission ambulance rolled, followed slowly by the
rain-soaked troopers of the escort.

In front of one of the outhouses a tall, bald-headed, jolly-faced
civilian stood in his checked shirt sleeves, washing bloody hands
in a tin basin. To Ailsa's question he answered:

"I'm Dr. Hammond of the Sanitary Commission. Dr. West is in the
wards. Very glad you came, Mrs. Paige; very glad, indeed, Miss
Lynden. Here's an orderly who'll show you your quarters--can't
give you more than one room and one bed. You'll get breakfast in
that house over there, as soon as it's ready. After that come back
here to me. There's plenty to do," he added grimly; "we're just
sending fifty patients to Alexandria, and twenty-five to
Washington. Oh, yes, there's plenty to do--plenty to do in this
God-forsaken land. And, it isn't battles that are keeping us busy."

No, it was not battles that kept the doctors, nurses, and details
for the ambulance corps busy at the front that first autumn and
winter in Virginia. Few patients required the surgeon, few wounded
were received, victims of skirmish or sharpshooting or of their own
comrades' carelessness. But unwounded patients were arriving
faster and faster from the corduroy road squads, from the outposts
in the marshy forests, from the pickets' hovels on the red-mud
banks of the river, from chilly rifle pits and windy hill camps,
from the trenches along Richmond Turnpike, from the stockades at
Fairfax. And there seemed no end of them. Hundreds of regimental
hospital tents, big affairs, sixty feet long by forty wide, were
always full. The hospitals at Alexandria, Kalorama, the Columbia,
and the Stone Mansion, took the overflow, or directed it to
Washington, Philadelphia, and the North.

In one regiment alone, the Saratoga Regiment, the majority of the
men were unfit for duty. In one company only twelve men could be
mustered for evening parade. Typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria,
spotted fever were doing their work in the raw, unacclimated
regiments. Regimental medical officers were exhausted.

Two steady streams of human beings, flowing in opposite directions,
had set in with the autumn; the sick, going North, the new
regiments arriving from the North to this vast rendezvous, where a
great organizer of men was welding together militia and volunteers,
hammering out of th