the gun
that announced their arrival. There was shortly added, also, a volunteer
hospital for the more dangerously wounded when first brought from the
battle-field, and of it is told a story that Americans will like to
hear.

It is of a Wisconsin soldier, who, taken prisoner, effected his escape
from Richmond. Hiding by day, he forced his way at night through morass
and forest, snatched such sleep as he dared on the damp and sodden
earth, went without food whole days, reached our lines bruised, torn,
shivering, starving, and his wounds, which had never been properly cared
for, opened afresh. Let him tell the rest, straight from his heart.

"When I had my rubber blanket to wrap about me, I was comfortable, and,
snug and warm in the cars, I thought myself happy; and when I heard them
talk of the 'Cooper Shop,' I said to myself, 'A cooper's shop! that will
be the very place of all the earth, for there I shall have a roof over
me, and the shavings will be so warm and dry to lie upon!' but when they
carried me in, and I opened my eyes and saw what was the Cooper Shop,
and the long tables all loaded for the poor soldiers, and when they took
me to the hospital up-stairs, and placed me in a bed, and real ladies
and gentlemen, with tears in their eyes, came and waited on me, my
manliness left me."

A want of manliness, O honest heart, for which there need be no shame!
Precious tribute to our country's great love for her sons! For this is
no sectional charity, only one example culled from thousands; for the
land must, of a necessity, be overshadowed by the tree that has a root
under almost every Northern hearth-stone; and then see how we are all
bound together by the heart-strings!

Forty thousand men-at-arms are looking gravely at the height towering
above the valley in which they stand. "Impregnable" military science
pronounced it; but the men scaling it know nothing of this word
"impregnable." They have heard nothing of an order for retreat,--they
are filled with a divine wrath of battle, and each man is as mad as his
neighbor, and the officers are powerless to hold them back, and catch
the infection and are swept on with them, and climbing, jumping,
slipping, toiling on hands and knees, swinging from tree and bush, any
way, any how, but always onward, never backward, they surge up over the
mountain-top, deadly volleys crashing right in among them, and set on
the Rebels with a wild hurrah! and the hearts below beat faster