MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

It seems forever since you left us, dearest Euthymia! And are you, and

is your husband, and Paolo,--good Paolo,--are you all as well and happy

as you have been and as you ought to be? I suppose our small village

seems a very quiet sort of place to pass the winter in, now that you have

become accustomed to the noise and gayety of a great city. For all that,

it is a pretty busy place this winter, I can tell you. We have sleighing

parties,--I never go to them, myself, because I can't keep warm, and my

mind freezes up when my blood cools down below 95 or 96 deg. Fahrenheit.

I had a great deal rather sit by a good fire and read about Arctic

discoveries. But I like very well to hear the bells' jingling and to see

the young people trying to have a good time as hard as they do at a

picnic. It may be that they do, but to me a picnic is purgatory and a

sleigh-ride that other place, where, as my favorite Milton says, "frost

performs the effect of fire." I believe I have quoted him correctly; I

ought to, for I could repeat half his poems from memory once, if I cannot

now.

You must have plenty of excitement in your city life. I suppose you

recognized yourself in one of the society columns of the "Household

Inquisitor:" "Mrs. E. K., very beautiful, in an elegant," etc., etc,

"with pearls," etc., etc.,--as if you were not the ornament of all that

you wear, no matter what it is!

I am so glad that you have married a scholar! Why should not

Maurice--you both tell me to call him so--take the diplomatic office

which has been offered him? It seems to me that he would find himself in

exactly the right place. He can talk in two or three languages, has good

manners, and a wife who--well, what shall I say of Mrs. Kirkwood but that

"she would be good company for a queen," as our old friend the quondam

landlady of the Anchor Tavern used to say? I should so like to see you

presented at Court! It seems to me that I should be willing to hold your

train for the sake of seeing you in your court feathers and things.

As for myself, I have been thinking of late that I would become either a

professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or college for

girls. I have tried the first business a little. Last month I delivered

a lecture on Quaternions. I got three for my audience; two came over

from the Institute, and one from that men's college which they try to

make out to be a university, and where no female is admitted unless she

belongs among the quadrupeds. I enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is a

difficult one, and I don't think any one of them had any very clear

notion of what I was talking about, except Rhodora,--and I know she did

n't. To tell the truth, I was lecturing to instruct myself. I mean to

try something easier next time. I have thought of the Basque language

and literature. What do you say to that?

The Society goes on famously. We have had a paper presented and read

lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the

weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres

at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor

"poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young

persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the

Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to sending

him their rhymed productions to be criticised,--expecting to be praised,

no doubt, every one of them. I must give you one of the sauciest

extracts from his paper in his own words:

"It takes half my time to read the 'poems' sent me by young people of

both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I

recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and

the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of

ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions

to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always

against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about

him or her, busy with some useful calling,--too busy to be tagging

rhymed commonplaces together. Just now there seems to be an epidemic of

rhyming as bad as the dancing mania, or the sweating sickness. After

reading a certain amount of manuscript verse one is disposed to

anathematize the inventor of homophonous syllabification. [This phrase

made a great laugh when it was read.] This, that is rhyming, must have

been found out very early,

"'Where are you, Adam?'

"'Here am I, Madam;'

"but it can never have been habitually practised until after the Fall.

The intrusion of tintinnabulating terminations into the conversational

intercourse of men and angels would have spoiled Paradise itself. Milton

would not have them even in Paradise Lost, you remember. For my own

part, I wish certain rhymes could be declared contraband of written or

printed language. Nothing should be allowed to be hurled at the world or

whirled with it, or furled upon it or curled over it; all eyes should be

kept away from the skies, in spite of os homini sublime dedit; youth

should be coupled with all the virtues except truth; earth should never

be reminded of her birth; death should never be allowed to stop a

mortal's breath, nor the bell to sound his knell, nor flowers from

blossoming bowers to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his

tomb. We have rhyming dictionaries,--let us have one from which all

rhymes are rigorously excluded. The sight of a poor creature grubbing

for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious,

rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical

operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with

jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel. Work, work of some

kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles!

No,--no,--no! I want to see the young people in our schools and

academies and colleges, and the graduates of these institutions, lifted

up out of the little Dismal Swamp of self-contemplating and

self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism which is surfeiting

the land with those literary sandwiches,--thin slices of tinkling

sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked gilt

gingerbread. But what faces these young folks make up at my good advice!

They get tipsy on their rhymes. Nothing intoxicates one like his--or

her--own verses, and they hold on to their metre-ballad-mongering as the

fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold on to the gas-bag."

We laughed over this essay of the old Professor; though it hit us pretty

hard. The best part of the joke is that the old man himself published a

thin volume of poems when he was young, which there is good reason to

think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up all the copies he

can find in the shops. No matter what they say, I can't help agreeing

with him about this great flood of "poetry," as it calls itself, and

looking at the rhyming mania much as he does.

How I do love real poetry! That is the reason hate rhymes which have not

a particle of it in them. The foolish scribblers that deal in them are

like bad workmen in a carpenter's shop. They not only turn out bad jobs

of work, but they spoil the tools for better workmen. There is hardly a

pair of rhymes in the English language that is not so dulled and hacked

and gapped by these 'prentice hands that a master of the craft hates to

touch them, and yet he cannot very well do without them. I have not been

besieged as the old Professor has been with such multitudes of

would-be-poetical aspirants that he could not even read their

manuscripts, but I have had a good many letters containing verses, and I

have warned the writers of the delusion under which they were laboring.

You may like to know that I have just been translating some extracts from

the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a

Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the

Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of

inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in

this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my

manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred

the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, or given

rhythmical expression to my own rapturous feelings with regard to them.

I must read you my Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I cannot help

thinking that you will like it better than either of my last two, The

Song of the Roses, or The Wail of the Weeds.

How I do miss you, dearest! I want you: I want you to listen to what I

have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future; I

want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one's self to

be such a noble and beautiful-creature; I want to wander in the woods

with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk over every

day's doings with you. Alas! I feel that we have parted as two friends

part at a port of embarkation: they embrace, they kiss each other's

cheeks, they cover their faces and weep, they try to speak good-by to

each other, they watch from the pier and from the deck; the two forms

grow less and less, fainter and fainter in the distance, two white

handkerchiefs flutter once and again, and yet once more, and the last

visible link of the chain which binds them has parted. Dear, dear,

dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over with tears when I think that

we may never, never meet again.

Don't you want some more items of village news? We are threatened with

an influx of stylish people: "Buttons" to answer the door-bell, in place

of the chamber-maid; "butler," in place of the "hired man;" footman in

top-boots and breeches, cockade on hat, arms folded a la Napoleon;

tandems, "drags," dogcarts, and go-carts of all sorts. It is rather

amusing to look at their ambitious displays, but it takes away the good

old country flavor of the place.

I don't believe you mean to try to astonish us when you come back to

spend your summers here. I suppose you must have a large house, and I am

sure you will have a beautiful one. I suppose you will have some fine

horses, and who would n't be glad to? But I do not believe you will try

to make your old Arrowhead Village friends stare their eyes out of their

heads with a display meant to outshine everybody else that comes here.

You can have a yacht on the lake, if you like, but I hope you will pull a

pair of oars in our old boat once in a while, with me to steer you. I

know you will be just the same dear-Euthymia you always were and always

must be. How happy you must make such a man as Maurice Kirkwood! And

how happy you ought to be with him!--a man who knows what is in books,

and who has seen for himself, what is in men. If he has not seen so much

of women, where could he study all that is best in womanhood as he can in

his own wife? Only one thing that dear Euthymia lacks. She is not quite

pronounced enough in her views as to the rights and the wrongs of the

sex. When I visit you, as you say I shall, I mean to indoctrinate

Maurice with sound views on that subject. I have written an essay for

the Society, which I hope will go a good way towards answering all the

objections to female suffrage. I mean to read it to your husband, if you

will let me, as I know you will, and perhaps you would like to hear

it,--only you know my thoughts on the subject pretty well already.

With all sorts of kind messages to your dear husband, and love to your

precious self, I am ever your

LURIDA.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

MY DEAR EUTHYMIA,--My pen refuses to call you by any other name.

Sweet-souled you are, and your Latinized Greek name is--the one which

truly designates you. I cannot tell you how we have followed you, with

what interest and delight through your travels, as you have told their

story in your letters to your mother. She has let us have the privilege

of reading them, and we have been with you in steamer, yacht, felucca,

gondola, Nile-boat; in all sorts of places, from crowded capitals to

"deserts where no men abide,"--everywhere keeping company with you in

your natural and pleasant descriptions of your experiences. And now that

you have returned to your home in the great city I must write you a few

lines of welcome, if nothing more.

You will find Arrowhead Village a good deal changed since you left it.

We are discovered by some of those over-rich people who make the little

place upon which they swarm a kind of rural city. When this happens the

consequences are striking,--some of them desirable and some far

otherwise. The effect of well-built, well-furnished, well-kept houses

and of handsome grounds always maintained in good order about them shows

itself in a large circuit around the fashionable centre. Houses get on a

new coat of paint, fences are kept in better order, little plots of

flowers show themselves where only ragged weeds had rioted, the

inhabitants present themselves in more comely attire and drive in

handsomer vehicles with more carefully groomed horses. On the other

hand, there is a natural jealousy on the part of the natives of the

region suddenly become fashionable. They have seen the land they sold at

farm prices by the acre coming to be valued by the foot, like the corner

lots in a city. Their simple and humble modes of life look almost

poverty-stricken in the glare of wealth and luxury which so outshines

their plain way of living. It is true that many of them have found them

selves richer than in former days, when the neighborhood lived on its own

resources. They know how to avail themselves of their altered position,

and soon learn to charge city prices for country products; but nothing

can make people feel rich who see themselves surrounded by men whose

yearly income is many times their own whole capital. I think it would be

better if our rich men scattered themselves more than they do,--buying

large country estates, building houses and stables which will make it

easy to entertain their friends, and depending for society on chosen

guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who come together for

social rivalry. But I do not fret myself about it. Society will stratify

itself according to the laws of social gravitation. It will take a

generation or two more, perhaps, to arrange the strata by precipitation

and settlement, but we can always depend on one principle to govern the

arrangement of the layers. People interested in the same things will

naturally come together. The youthful heirs of fortunes who keep splendid

yachts have little to talk about with the oarsman who pulls about on the

lake or the river. What does young Dives, who drives his four-in-hand

and keeps a stable full of horses, care about Lazarus, who feels rich in

the possession of a horse-railroad ticket? You know how we live at our

house, plainly, but with a certain degree of cultivated propriety. We

make no pretensions to what is called "style." We are still in that

social stratum where the article called "a napkin-ring" is recognized as

admissible at the dinner-table. That fact sufficiently defines our

modest pretensions. The napkin-ring is the boundary mark between certain

classes. But one evening Mrs. Butts and I went out to a party given by

the lady of a worthy family, where the napkin itself was a newly

introduced luxury. The conversation of the hostess and her guests turned

upon details of the kitchen and the laundry; upon the best mode of

raising bread, whether with "emptins" (emptyings, yeast) or baking

powder; about "bluing" and starching and crimping, and similar matters.

Poor Mrs. Butts! She knew nothing more about such things than her

hostess did about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. What was the use

of trying to enforce social intercourse under such conditions?

Incompatibility of temper has been considered ground for a divorce;

incompatibility of interests is a sufficient warrant for social

separation. The multimillionaires have so much that is common among

themselves, and so little that they share with us of moderate means, that

they will naturally form a specialized class, and in virtue of their

palaces, their picture-galleries, their equipages, their yachts, their

large hospitality, constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy. Religion,

which ought to be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the

same grade. You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in

hither not having a wedding garment?" The modern version would be, "How

came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your back which

came from Paris?"

The little church has got a new stained window, a saint who reminds me of

Hamlet's uncle,--a thing "of shreds and patches," but rather pretty to

look at, with an inscription under it which is supposed to be the name of

the person in whose honor the window was placed in the church. Smith was

a worthy man and a faithful churchwarden, and I hope posterity will be

able to spell out his name on his monumental window; but that old English

lettering would puzzle Mephistopheles himself, if he found himself before

this memorial tribute, on the inside,--you know he goes to church

sometimes, if you remember your Faust.

The rector has come out, in a quiet way, as an evolutionist. He has

always been rather "broad" in his views, but cautious in their

expression. You can tell the three branches of the mother-island church

by the way they carry their heads. The low-church clergy look down, as

if they felt themselves to be worms of the dust; the high-church priest

drops his head on one side, after the pattern of the mediaeval saints;

the broad-church preacher looks forward and round about him, as if he

felt himself the heir of creation. Our rector carries his head in the

broad-church aspect, which I suppose is the least open to the charge of

affectation,--in fact, is the natural and manly way of carrying it.

The Society has justified its name of Pansophian of late as never before.

Lurida has stirred up our little community and its neighbors, so that we

get essays on all sorts of subjects, poems and stories in large numbers.

I know all about it, for she often consults me as to the merits of a

particular contribution.

What is to be the fate of Lurida? I often think, with no little interest

and some degree of anxiety, about her future. Her body is so frail and

her mind so excessively and constantly active that I am afraid one or the

other will give way. I do not suppose she thinks seriously of ever being

married. She grows more and more zealous in behalf of her own sex, and

sterner in her judgment of the other. She declares that she never would

marry any man who was not an advocate of female suffrage, and as these

gentlemen are not very common hereabouts the chance is against her

capturing any one of the hostile sex.

What do you think? I happened, just as I was writing the last sentence,

to look out of my window, and whom should I see but Lurida, with a young

man in tow, listening very eagerly to her conversation, according to all

appearance! I think he must be a friend of the rector, as I have seen a

young man like this one in his company. Who knows?

Affectionately yours, etc.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.

MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would have

thought could have been got together in this little village during the

short time you have been staying away from it.

Lurida Vincent is engaged! He is a clergyman with a mathematical turn.

The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the mathematical

journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution that the young

man fell in love with her on the strength of it. I don't think the story

is literally true, nor do I believe that other report that he offered

himself to her in the form of an equation chalked on the blackboard; but

that it was an intellectual rather than a sentimental courtship I do not

doubt. Lurida has given up the idea of becoming a professional

lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking that her future husband's parish

will find her work enough to do. A certain amount of daily domestic

drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded people will be the

best thing in the world for that brain of hers, always simmering with

some new project in its least fervid condition.

All our summer visitors have arrived. Euthymia Mrs. Maurice Kirkwood and

her husband and little Maurice are here in their beautiful house looking

out on the lake. They gave a grand party the other evening. You ought

to have been there, but I suppose you could not very well have left your

sister in the middle of your visit: All the grand folks were there, of

course. Lurida and her young man--Gabriel is what she calls him--were

naturally the objects of special attention. Paolo acted as major-domo,

and looked as if he ought to be a major-general. Nothing could be

pleasanter than the way in which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their

plain country neighbors; that is, just as they did the others of more

pretensions, as if they were really glad to see them, as I am sure they

were. The old landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves,

and I saw Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at the

dancers and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently

enjoying it as much as her old employers. It was a most charming and

successful party. We had two sensations in the course of the evening.

One was pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of

strange and startling interest.

You remember how emaciated poor Maurice Kirkwood was left after his

fever, in that first season when he was among us. He was out in a boat

one day, when a ring slipped off his thin finger and sunk in a place

where the water was rather shallow. "Jake"--you know Jake,--everybody

knows Jake--was rowing him. He promised to come to the spot and fish up

the ring if he could possibly find it. He was seen poking about with

fish-hooks at the end of a pole, but nothing was ever heard from him

about the ring. It was an antique intaglio stone in an Etruscan

setting,--a wild goose flying over the Campagna. Mr. Kirkwood valued it

highly, and regretted its loss very much.

While we were in the garden, who should appear at the gate but Jake, with

a great basket, inquiring for Mr. Kirkwood. "Come," said Maurice to me,

"let us see what our old friend the fisherman has brought us. What have

you got there, Jake?"

"What I 've got? Wall, I 'll tell y' what I've got: I 've got the

biggest pickerel that's been ketched in this pond for these ten year. An'

I 've got somethin' else besides the pickerel. When I come to cut him

open, what do you think I faound in his insides but this here ring o'

yourn,"--and he showed the one Maurice had lost so long before. There it

was, as good as new, after having tried Jonah's style of housekeeping for

all that time. There are those who discredit Jake's story about finding

the ring in the fish; anyhow, there was the ring and there was the

pickerel. I need not say that Jake went off well paid for his pickerel

and the precious contents of its stomach. Now comes the chief event of

the evening. I went early by special invitation. Maurice took me into

his library, and we sat down together.

"I have something of great importance," he said, "to say to you. I

learned within a few days that my cousin Laura is staying with a friend

in the next town to this. You know, doctor, that we have never met since

the last, almost fatal, experience of my early years. I have determined

to defy the strength of that deadly chain of associations connected with

her presence, and I have begged her to come this evening with the friends

with whom she is staying. Several letters passed between us, for it was

hard to persuade her that there was no longer any risk in my meeting her.

Her imagination was almost as deeply impressed as mine had been at those

alarming interviews, and I had to explain to her fully that I had become

quite indifferent to the disturbing impressions of former years. So, as

the result of our correspondence, Laura is coming this evening, and I

wish you to be present at our meeting. There is another reason why I

wish you to be here. My little boy is not far from the--age at which I

received my terrifying, almost disorganizing shock. I mean to have

little Maurice brought into the presence of Laura, who is said to be

still a very handsome woman, and see if he betrays any hint of that

peculiar sensitiveness which showed itself in my threatening seizure. It

seemed to me not impossible that he might inherit some tendency of that

nature, and I wanted you to be at hand if any sign of danger should

declare itself. For myself I have no fear. Some radical change has

taken place in my nervous system. I have been born again, as it were, in

my susceptibilities, and am in certain respects a new man. But I must

know how it is with my little Maurice."

Imagine with what interest I looked forward to this experiment; for

experiment it was, and not without its sources of anxiety, as it seemed

to me. The evening wore along; friends and neighbors came in, but no

Laura as yet. At last I heard the sound of wheels, and a carriage

stopped at the door. Two ladies and a gentleman got out, and soon

entered the drawing room.

"My cousin Laura!" whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to meet her.

A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the thirties,--one of

those women so thoroughly constituted that they cannot help being

handsome at every period of life. I watched them both as they approached

each other. Both looked pale at first, but Maurice soon recovered his

usual color, and Laura's natural, rich bloom came back by degrees. Their

emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there was no trace in

it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of life which had

once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head which turned the

looker-on into a stone.

"Is the boy still awake?" said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to say

of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on that gay

and busy evening.

"What! Mahser Maurice asleep an' all this racket going on? I hear him

crowing like young cockerel when he fus' smell daylight."

"Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that leads

out of the library."

The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake, wondering

apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think was for his

special amusement.

"See if he will go to that lady," said his father. Both of us held our

breath as Laura stretched her arms towards little Maurice.

The child looked for an instant searchingly, but fearlessly, at her

glowing cheeks, her bright eyes, her welcoming smile, and met her embrace

as she clasped him to her bosom as if he had known her all his days.

The mortal antipathy had died out of the soul and the blood of Maurice

Kirkwood at that supreme moment when he found himself snatched from the

grasp of death and cradled in the arms of Euthymia.

--------------------------

In closing the New Portfolio I remember that it began with a prefix which

the reader may by this time have forgotten, namely, the First Opening.

It was perhaps presumptuous to thus imply the probability of a second

opening.

I am reminded from time to time by the correspondents who ask a certain

small favor of me that, as I can only expect to be with my surviving

contemporaries a very little while longer, they would be much obliged if

I would hurry up my answer before it is too late. They are right, these

delicious unknown friends of mine, in reminding me of a fact which I

cannot gainsay and might suffer to pass from my recollection. I thank

them for recalling my attention to a truth which I shall be wiser, if not

more hilarious, for remembering.

No, I had no right to say the First Opening. How do I know that I shall

have a chance to open it again? How do I know that anybody will want it

to be opened a second time? How do I know that I shall feel like opening

it? It is safest neither to promise to open the New Portfolio once more,

nor yet to pledge myself to keep it closed hereafter. There are many

papers potentially existent in it, some of which might interest a reader

here and there. The Records of the Pansophian Society contain a

considerable number of essays, poems, stories, and hints capable of being

expanded into presentable dimensions. In the mean time I will say with

Prospero, addressing my old readers, and my new ones, if such I have,

"If you be pleased, retire into my cell

And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,

To still my beating mind."

When it has got quiet I may take up the New Portfolio again, and consider

whether it is worth while to open it consider whether it is worth while

to open it.

PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

CONTENTS:

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN"

THE INEVITABLE TRIAL

CINDERS FROM ASHES

THE PULPIT AND THE PEW

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

(September, 1861.)

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace.

It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have something to

eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have something to eat, and

the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our

carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to

Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new

dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with.

If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its

respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a

caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed

nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one,

if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a

pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the

newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions,

as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his

fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would

have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely

repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have

experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later

betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among

us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which

diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible

emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec

tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where

all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled in the

most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after their

entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years' attendance, all the

inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones. He

does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered to

those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous

system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants. Take the

first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad disaster

to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of two

gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden feeling

at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, changed

color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a

"grande revolution," as French patients say,--went home, and kept her bed

for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of

such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself

follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old, gentleman fell

senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba.

One of our early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was

thought to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements

of the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a devouring

passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire of

it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of

adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of

participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal

distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we

often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most

ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different

form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a

drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families. Some

of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain

in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that

is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men

cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll

up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We

confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his

work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as interesting

as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light

of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he

confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had

closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more

than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony

and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen

into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over

and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as

if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not

often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?

Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the

noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he

wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great

capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in

our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go

tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that

make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round

through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a

track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.

This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of

April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto

operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we

once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the

leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already

turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not

wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from

peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we

cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about through the

twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like

some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us

on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the

feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is,

after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and

shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed

grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact

always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the

dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.

Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,--at least, he suspects

himself of indisposition. Nothing serious,--let us just rub our

fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs his

hands, and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar twisting

movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No! all is not quite right

yet. Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought to be. Let

us settle that where it should be, and then we shall certainly be in good

trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old lady adjusts her cap,

and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten washing herself. Poor

fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he has to deal with. If he

could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were

Fly-Paper.--So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we

dream! Perhaps very young persons may not understand this; as we grow

older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of

old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be

had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must

go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner

nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand

on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine

right of its telegraphic dispatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of

Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the

Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,

which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that

time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the

neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower of

Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As

for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and everybody

knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in its

political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us who are not in

the last quarter of their century. We are learning many strange matters

from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of

existence which make war as it is with us very different from war as it

has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole

nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves

which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns

and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body.

The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the

limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was the

railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of

April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a

clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous

action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless

courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight of

for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know for

a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden with

truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always for the

last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of our

armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their

own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the

tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned

like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;

now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And

this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another

singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We

may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a

week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would

have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was

organized.

"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,

Thou only teachest all that man can be!"

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of

long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful

prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind, we

have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially when one

of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and

keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us a

new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in our

poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can be

and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all

back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more or less

kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or

literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and

women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social

distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the

preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out

that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility.

All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.

The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like

a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy

and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his

straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or

leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs

as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the

same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed

antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the, "bloated

aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy,

sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for

learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of an

organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their courage

is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their slender

figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our

windows. A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the water's

edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who

looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall,"

he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange

physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our

present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the

surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared

over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable

grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with

the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and

unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of

fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed

by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not

unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times

had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern people as

the English in the last centuries used to talk about the

French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one

Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,

again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider

the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that

Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and

Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging

iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free

working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned.

The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change

their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer

the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build

towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute

matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new

shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a man

in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones

and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop,

marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little startled to

find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth

Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to

do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed

over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own

soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment

of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental

provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of

Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen

chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When the

masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his heart

that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist"

Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young

fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the

Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoousians

translated from the battle-field to the abodes of everlasting woe? War

not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not

be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of

judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man

should have but two thoughts: to do his duty, and trust his Maker. Let

our brave dead come back from the fields where they have fallen for law

and liberty, and if you will follow them to their graves, you will find

out what the Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its

exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen

heroes had defended! Very little comparatively do we hear at such times

of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in

which all sincere Christians can agree. It is a noble lesson, and

nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it shall

be heard over all the angry cries of theological disputants.

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and to

get at their principles of judgment. Perhaps most, of us, will agree

that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the experience

of the last six months. We had the notable predictions attributed to the

Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused to fulfil themselves.

We were infested at one time with a set of ominous-looking seers, who

shook their heads and muttered obscurely about some mighty preparations

that were making to substitute the rule of the minority for that of the

majority. Organizations were darkly hinted at; some thought our armories

would be seized; and there are not wanting ancient women in the

neighboring University town who consider that the country was saved by

the intrepid band of students who stood guard, night after night, over

the G. R. cannon and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are those

which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come to pass,

and remind us that they have made long ago. Those who, are rash enough

to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they hope, or what

they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of their own, or some

guess founded on private information not half so good as what everybody

gets who reads the papers,--never by any possibility a word that we can

depend on, simply because there are cobwebs of contingency between every

to-day and to-morrow that no field-glass can penetrate when fifty of them

lie woven one over another. Prophesy as much as you like, but always

hedge. Say that you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly

supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger

than is anticipated. Say what you like,--only don't be too peremptory

and dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been notoriously

deceived in their predictions in this very matter.

Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis.

Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as a

prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.

There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that already

referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation to the great

events passing around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to have

elapsed since this war began. The buds were then swelling which held the

leaves that are still green. It seems as old as Time himself. We cannot

fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes of to-day and

those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into each other

like the joints of a pocket-telescope. When the young men from Middlesex

dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the

other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always been the mint in

which the world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or

month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that the first impression

bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face

hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields are alike in their

main features. The young fellows who fell in our earlier struggle seemed

like old men to us until within these few months; now we remember they

were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they go to the fight; it

seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was crimsoned but yesterday,

and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-tower would feel warm, if we

laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from

earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are

but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the

field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right

against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a movement

onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its

mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we

think. Our bullets and cannonballs have lengthened into bolts like those

which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons,

such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly

invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we

trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness,

our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better,

because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and

our people are rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is

the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, if need

be, to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this world, that the

generations to follow you may inherit a whole country whose natural

condition shall be peace, and not a broken province which must live under

the perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and all

that war brings with it? If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles

may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are

not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view of the

momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up

all, but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear

to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it is called for. The

time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our

means cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once

the marketplace to the voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory.

Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to

read and nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a

compromise. At present we have all that nature absolutely demands,--we

can live on bread and the newspaper.

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam,

my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a

telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of

battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with

throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might

bring.

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the

envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:

HAGERSTOWN 17th

To__________ H ______

Capt H______ wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at

Keedysville

WILLIAM G. LEDUC

Through the neck,--no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, food-pipe,

carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable vessels, a

great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,--ought

to kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought

mortal,--which was it? The first; that is better than the second would

be.--"Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland." Leduc?

Leduc? Don't remember that name. The boy is waiting for his money. A

dollar and thirteen cents. Has nobody got thirteen cents? Don't keep

that boy waiting,--how do we know what messages he has got to carry?

The boy had another message to carry. It was to the father of

Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was

grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a

town a few miles this side of Keedysville. This I learned the next

morning from the civil and attentive officials at the Central Telegraph

Office.

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the

quarter past two o'clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an

accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or

pressing emergency. I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the cars.

I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose society

would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, and

whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim.

It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished apart,

that I mean to give my "Atlantic" readers an account. They must let me

tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little matters that

interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely class of elderly

persons, who sit at their firesides and never travel, will, I hope,

follow with a kind of interest. For, besides the main object of my

excursion, I could not help being excited by the incidental sights and

occurrences of a trip which to a commercial traveller or a

newspaper-reporter would seem quite commonplace and undeserving of

record. There are periods in which all places and people seem to be in a

conspiracy to impress us with their individuality, in which every

ordinary locality seems to assume a special significance and to claim a

particular notice, in which every person we meet is either an old

acquaintance or a character; days in which the strangest coincidences are

continually happening, so that they get to be the rule, and not the

exception. Some might naturally think that anxiety and the weariness of

a prolonged search after a near relative would have prevented my taking

any interest in or paying any regard to the little matters around me.

Perhaps it had just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused

stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide-awake in

pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing

emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in

respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly

illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has

developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous

story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though

many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless and unwise

fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about them,

which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young

fellows to leave his sweetheart and go into a Peninsular campaign, though

I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was

thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all

the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth

that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed,

that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I

did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity,

and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked

with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative

friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad

journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself

agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many

times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an

hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations

into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in

curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous

experiment,--fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when

a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,--all this without

volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as

the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound

up,--many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum

with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend,

cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and

opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the

flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old

weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and

attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry

during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of

fresh juices. My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced

by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the

exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in

what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it

pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near

objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a

right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly

backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear

to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if

they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape

becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the

middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and

longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied

them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The

traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of

Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found "his

warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of the

great city hotels. The unheralded guest who is honored by mere

indifference may think himself blessed with singular good-fortune. If

the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his

manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. The coldest

welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the door of a bishop's

palace, the most icy reception that a country cousin ever received at the

city mansion of a mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to

that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated

circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your

name on his dog's-eared register. I have less hesitation in unburdening

myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met

with more than one exception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I

suppose, as a matter of course. One cannot expect an office clerk to

embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a

telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he

receives for transmission. Still, humanity is not always totally

extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in a telegraph

office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in

conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as

if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with

sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole side of the

car maybe made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a

traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust

looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees are

common, and champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by,

feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty

passion come over me to be the captain of one,--to glide back and forward

upon a sea never roughened by storms,--to float where I could not

sink,--to navigate where there is no shipwreck,--to lie languidly on the

deck and govern the huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger:

there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has

not often envied a cobbler in his stall?

The boys cry the "N'-York Heddle," instead of "Herald"; I remember that

years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther end of the

dumb-bell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the waters,

so we must approach Philadelphia by the river. Her physiognomy is not

distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious

steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking

bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails

on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves,

elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the

walls of a hock-glass.

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be

heard of, if anywhere in this region. His lieutenant-colonel was there,

gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son of the

house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of

the last, was there, prostrate with fever. A fourth bed was waiting

ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though

inquiries had been made in the towns from and through which the father

had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel. And so my search is,

like a "Ledger" story, to be continued.

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon-train for Baltimore.

Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards. We had found upon

the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the wife of one of our

most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave Colonel of the __th

Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at Middletown, a place lying

directly in our track. She was the light of our party while we were

together on our pilgrimage, a fair, gracious woman, gentle, but

courageous,

---"ful plesant and amiable of port,

---estatelich of manere,

And to ben holden digne of reverence."

On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party Dr.

William Hunt of Philadelphia, who had most kindly and faithfully attended

the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at Ball's Bluff,

which came very near being mortal. He was going upon an errand of mercy

to the wounded, and found he had in his memorandum-book the name of our

lady's husband, the Colonel, who had been commended to his particular

attention.

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry keeping

guard over a short railroad bridge. It was the first evidence that we

were approaching the perilous borders, the marches where the North and

the South mingle their angry hosts, where the extremes of our so-called

civilization meet in conflict, and the fierce slave-driver of the Lower

Mississippi stares into the stern eyes of the forest-feller from the

banks of the Aroostook. All the way along, the bridges were guarded more

or less strongly. In a vast country like ours, communications play a far

more complex part than in Europe, where the whole territory available for

strategic purposes is so comparatively limited. Belgium, for instance,

has long been the bowling-alley where kings roll cannon-balls at each

other's armies; but here we are playing the game of live ninepins without

any alley.

We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, as we were too late for

the train to Frederick. At the Eutaw House, where we found both comfort

and courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled the evening hours

for us in the most agreeable manner. We devoted some time to procuring

surgical and other articles, such as might be useful to our friends, or

to others, if our friends should not need them. In the morning, I found

myself seated at the breakfast-table next to General Wool. It did not

surprise me to find the General very far from expansive. With Fort

McHenry on his shoulders and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and the

weight of a military department loading down his social safety-valves, I

thought it a great deal for an officer in his trying position to select

so very obliging and affable an aid as the gentleman who relieved him of

the burden of attending to strangers.

We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Frederick. As we stood

waiting on the platform, a telegraphic message was handed in silence to

my companion. Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was hastening to

see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. It was no time for

empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and that now was not

the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, felt as women feel

it.

Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me as the friend of a

beloved relative of my own, who was with him during a severe illness in

Switzerland; and for whom while living, and for whose memory when dead,

he retained the warmest affection. Since that the story of his noble

deeds of daring, of his capture and escape, and a brief visit home before

he was able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name familiar to many

among us, myself among the number. His memory has been honored by those

who had the largest opportunity of knowing his rare promise, as a man of

talents and energy of nature. His abounding vitality must have produced

its impression on all who met him; there was a still fire about him which

any one could see would blaze up to melt all difficulties and recast

obstacles into implements in the mould of an heroic will. These elements

of his character many had the chance of knowing; but I shall always

associate him with the memory of that pure and noble friendship which

made me feel that I knew him before I looked upon his face, and added a

personal tenderness to the sense of loss which I share with the whole

community.

Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the companions with whom I set

out on my journey.

In one of the cars, at the same station, we met General Shriver of

Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose name is synonymous with a hearty

welcome to all whom he can aid by his counsel and his hospitality. He

took great pains to give us all the information we needed, and expressed

the hope, which was afterwards fulfilled, to the great gratification of

some of us, that we should meet again when he should return to his home.

There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip to Frederick, except

our passing a squad of Rebel prisoners, whom I missed seeing, as they

flashed by, but who were said to be a most forlorn-looking crowd of

scarecrows. Arrived at the Monocacy River, about three miles this side

of Frederick, we came to a halt, for the railroad bridge had been blown

up by the Rebels, and its iron pillars and arches were lying in the bed

of the river. The unfortunate wretch who fired the train was killed by

the explosion, and lay buried hard by, his hands sticking out of the

shallow grave into which he had been huddled. This was the story they

told us, but whether true or not I must leave to the correspondents of

"Notes and Queries" to settle.

There was a great confusion of carriages and wagons at the stopping-place

of the train, so that it was a long time before I could get anything that

would carry us. At last I was lucky enough to light on a sturdy wagon,

drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and driven by James Grayden, with

whom I was destined to have a somewhat continued acquaintance. We took

up a little girl who had been in Baltimore during the late Rebel inroad.

It made me think of the time when my own mother, at that time six years

old, was hurried off from Boston, then occupied by the British soldiers,

to Newburyport, and heard the people saying that "the redcoats were

coming, killing and murdering everybody as they went along." Frederick

looked cheerful for a place that had so recently been in an enemy's

hands. Here and there a house or shop was shut up, but the national

colors were waving in all directions, and the general aspect was peaceful

and contented. I saw no bullet-marks or other sign of the fighting which

had gone on in the streets. The Colonel's lady was taken in charge by a

daughter of that hospitable family to which we had been commended by its

head, and I proceeded to inquire for wounded officers at the various

temporary hospitals.

At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, I heard mention of an

officer in an upper chamber, and, going there, found Lieutenant Abbott,

of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with what looked

like typhoid fever. While there, who should come in but the almost

ubiquitous Lieutenant Wilkins, of the same Twentieth, whom I had met

repeatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and who was just from

the battle-ground. He was going to Boston in charge of the body of the

lamented Dr. Revere, the Assistant Surgeon of the regiment, killed on the

field. From his lips I learned something of the mishaps of the regiment.

My Captain's wound he spoke of as less grave than at first thought; but

he mentioned incidentally having heard a story recently that he was

killed,--a fiction, doubtless,--a mistake,--a palpable absurdity,--not to

be remembered or made any account of. Oh no! but what dull ache is this

in that obscurely sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the

nervous centre called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself

until a great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the

non-conductors which isolate it from ordinary impressions? I talked

awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who lay prostrate, feeble, but

soldier-like and uncomplaining, carefully waited upon by a most excellent

lady, a captain's wife, New England born, loyal as the Liberty on a

golden ten-dollar piece, and of lofty bearing enough to have sat for that

goddess's portrait. She had stayed in Frederick through the Rebel

inroad, and kept the star-spangled banner where it would be safe, to

unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off from the pavement of the

town.

Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentleman, occupying a small

chamber, and filling it with his troubles. When he gets well and plump,

I know he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help smiling in

the midst of my sympathy for him. He had been a well-favored man, he

said, sweeping his hand in a semicircle, which implied that his

acute-angled countenance had once filled the goodly curve he described.

He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look upon. Weakness had made him

querulous, as it does all of us, and he piped his grievances to me in a

thin voice, with that finish of detail which chronic invalidism alone can

command. He was starving,--he could not get what he wanted to eat. He

was in need of stimulants, and he held up a pitiful two-ounce phial

containing three thimblefuls--of brandy,--his whole stock of that

encouraging article. Him I consoled to the best of my ability, and

afterwards, in some slight measure, supplied his wants. Feed this poor

gentleman up, as these good people soon will, and I should not know him,

nor he himself. We are all egotists in sickness and debility. An animal

has been defined as "a stomach ministered to by organs;" and the greatest

man comes very near this simple formula after a month or two of fever and

starvation.

James Grayden and his team pleased me well enough, and so I made a

bargain with him to take us, the lady and myself, on our further journey

as far as Middletown. As we were about starting from the front of the

United States Hotel, two gentlemen presented themselves and expressed a

wish to be allowed to share our conveyance. I looked at them and

convinced myself that they were neither Rebels in disguise, nor

deserters, nor camp-followers, nor miscreants, but plain, honest men on a

proper errand. The first of them I will pass over briefly. He was a

young man of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a Pennsylvania

regiment, which he was going to rejoin. He belonged to the Moravian

Church, of which I had the misfortune to know little more than what I had

learned from Southey's "Life of Wesley." and from the exquisite hymns we

have borrowed from its rhapsodists. The other stranger was a New

Englander of respectable appearance, with a grave, hard, honest,

hay-bearded face, who had come to serve the sick and wounded on the

battle-field and in its immediate neighborhood. There is no reason why I

should not mention his name, but I shall content myself with calling him

the Philanthropist.

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James

Grayden their driver, the gentle lady, whose serene patience bore up

through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist, and

myself, the teller of this story.

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the trail

from the great battle-field. The road was filled with straggling and

wounded soldiers. All who could travel on foot,--multitudes with slight

wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face,--were told to take up

their beds,--alight burden or none at all,--and walk. Just as the

battle-field sucks everything into its red vortex for the conflict, so

does it drive everything off in long, diverging rays after the fierce

centripetal forces have met and neutralized each other. For more than a

week there had been sharp fighting all along this road. Through the

streets of Frederick, through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain,

sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the

Antietam, the long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes

which tear their path through our fields and villages. The slain of

higher condition, "embalmed" and iron-cased, were sliding off on the

railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being

gathered up and committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were

cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to

the neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as

I have said, at every step in the road. It was a pitiable sight, truly

pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many

single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more

than the sight of this great caravan of maimed pilgrims. The

companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of their suffering;

it was next to impossible to individualize it, and so bring it home, as

one can do with a single broken limb or aching wound. Then they were all

of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime of their strength.

Though they tramped so wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing

in store for them. These wounds they bore would be the medals they would

show their children and grandchildren by and by. Who would not rather

wear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and sympathy.

Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed with fever or pale

with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary limbs

along as if each step would exhaust their slender store of strength. At

the roadside sat or lay others, quite spent with their journey. Here and

there was a house at which the wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear

often vain, of getting refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool

spring, where the little bands of the long procession halted for a few

moments, as the trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains.

My companions had brought a few peaches along with them, which the

Philanthropist bestowed upon the tired and thirsty soldiers with a

satisfaction which we all shared. I had with me a small flask of strong

waters, to be used as a medicine in case of inward grief. From this,

also, he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor fellow who

looked as if he needed it. I rather admired the simplicity with which he

applied my limited means of solace to the first-comer who wanted it more

than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on ceremony, and had

I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I should not have

reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any more than I grudged my other

ardent friend the two dollars and more which it cost me to send the

charitable message he left in my hands.

It was a lovely country through which we were riding. The hillsides

rolled away into the distance, slanting up fair and broad to the sun, as

one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at Lanesborough,

for instance, or in the many-hued mountain chalice at the bottom of which

the Shaker houses of Lebanon have shaped themselves like a sediment of

cubical crystals. The wheat was all garnered, and the land ploughed for

a new crop. There was Indian corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins

warming their yellow carapaces in the sunshine like so many turtles; only

in a single instance did I notice some wretched little miniature

specimens in form and hue not unlike those colossal oranges of our

cornfields. The rail fences were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of

extinguished fires showed the use to which they had been applied. The

houses along the road were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden

fences were poorly built of laths or long slats, and very rarely of trim

aspect. The men of this region seemed to ride in the saddle very

generally, rather than drive. They looked sober and stern, less curious

and lively than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features familiar

to us in the countenance of the late John Tyler, our accidental

President, was frequently met with. The women were still more

distinguishable from our New England pattern. Soft, sallow, succulent,

delicately finished about the mouth and firmly shaped about the chin,

dark-eyed, full-throated, they looked as if they had been grown in a land

of olives. There was a little toss in their movement, full of

muliebrity. I fancied there was something more of the duck and less of

the chicken about them, as compared with the daughters of our leaner

soil; but these are mere impressions caught from stray glances, and if

there is any offence in them, my fair readers may consider them all

retracted.

At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields,

unburied, not grateful to gods or men. I saw no bird of prey, no

ill-omened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place

where it had been held. The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera, the

"twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature, doubtless; but

no black wing was spread over these animal ruins, and no call to the

banquet pierced through the heavy-laden and sickening air.

Full in the middle of the road, caring little for whom or what they met,

came long strings of army wagons, returning empty from the front after

supplies. James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they had a

little rather run into a fellow than not. I liked the looks of these

equipages and their drivers; they meant business. Drawn by mules mostly,

six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and

driver, they came jogging along the road, turning neither to right nor

left,--some driven by bearded, solemn white men, some by careless,

saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or

obsidian. There seemed to be nothing about them, dead or alive, that was

not serviceable. Sometimes a mule would give out on the road; then he

was left where he lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and

get up, when the first public wagon that came along would hitch him on,

and restore him to the sphere of duty.

It was evening when we got to Middletown. The gentle lady who had graced

our homely conveyance with her company here left us. She found her

husband, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quarters, well cared

for, very weak from the effects of the fearful operation he had been

compelled to undergo, but showing calm courage to endure as he had shown

manly energy to act. It was a meeting full of heroism and tenderness, of

which I heard more than there is need to tell. Health to the brave

soldier, and peace to the household over which so fair a spirit presides!

Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent surgical director of the

hospitals of the place, took me in charge. He carried me to the house of

a worthy and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed Church, where I

was to take tea and pass the night. What became of the Moravian chaplain

I did not know; but my friend the Philanthropist had evidently made up

his mind to adhere to my fortunes. He followed me, therefore, to the

house of the "Dominie." as a newspaper correspondent calls my kind host,

and partook of the fare there furnished me. He withdrew with me to the

apartment assigned for my slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow

where I waked and tossed. Nay, I do affirm that he did, unconsciously, I

believe, encroach on that moiety of the couch which I had flattered

myself was to be my own through the watches of the night, and that I was

in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be gradually, but

irresistibly, expelled from the bed which I had supposed destined for my

sole possession. As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the

Philanthropist clave unto me. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where

thou lodgest, I will lodge." A really kind, good man, full of zeal,

determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought, he doubted

nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a purely

benevolent errand. When he reads this, as I hope he will, let him be

assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any accommodation from

being in my company, let me tell him that I learned a lesson from his

active benevolence. I could, however, have wished to hear him laugh once

before we parted, perhaps forever. He did not, to the best of my

recollection, even smile during the whole period that we were in company.

I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not

so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of

sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in

passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a practical

specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with its peculiar

sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an

organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a

constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of

hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave,

occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social

force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its

legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it

whistles and sings at its work. When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled

with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospitals, he found

his temper and manners very different from what would have been expected.

My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration of

the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as above

mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them. The authorities

of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of that place, for

such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I have never seen in

the streets of a civilized town. It was getting late in the evening when

we began our rounds. The principal collections of the wounded were in

the churches. Boards were laid over the tops of the pews, on these some

straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with little or no covering

other than such scanty clothes as they had on. There were wounds of all

degrees of severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs. Most of the

sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all

had, I presume, received such attention as was required. Still, it was

but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals

suggested. I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but they

were used to camp life, and did not complain. The men who watched were

not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One of them was smoking his

pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw one poor fellow who had been shot

through the breast; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing,

anxious and restless. The men were debating about the opiate he was to

take, and I was thankful that I happened there at the right moment to see

that he was well narcotized for the night. Was it possible that my

Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these places? Certainly

possible, but not probable; but as the lantern was held over each bed, it

was with a kind of thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated.

Many times as I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I

started as some faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man's hair, the

outline of his half-turned face,--recalled the presence I was in search

of. The face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would

pass away, but still the fancy clung to me. There was no figure huddled

up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling

languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance, that

I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was making my

pilgrimage to the battlefield.

"There are two wounded Secesh," said my companion. I walked to the

bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember

right, from North Carolina. He was of good family, son of a judge in one

of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle,

intelligent. One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying helpless

and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards

those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in

deadly strife. The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this

Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race

in the men of the North and South. It would be worth a year of battles to

abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it out

were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of slight,

scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among

the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in

the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and

the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others of

like training with his own,--a man who, but for the curse which our

generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the

beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral

standard of a peaceful and united people.

On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having engaged James Grayden and his

team, I set out with the Chaplain and the Philanthropist for Keedysville.

Our track lay through the South Mountain Gap, and led us first to the

town of Boonsborough, where, it will be remembered, Colonel Dwight had

been brought after the battle. We saw the positions occupied in the

battle of South Mountain, and many traces of the conflict. In one

situation a group of young trees was marked with shot, hardly one having

escaped. As we walked by the side of the wagon, the Philanthropist left

us for a while and climbed a hill, where, along the line of a fence, he

found traces of the most desperate fighting. A ride of some three hours

brought us to Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army surgeon

who had charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little sleep

after his fatigues and watchings. He bore this cross very creditably,

and helped me to explore all places where my soldier might be lying among

the crowds of wounded. After the useless search, I resumed my journey,

fortified with a note of introduction to Dr. Letterman; also with a bale

of oakum which I was to carry to that gentleman, this substance being

employed as a substitute for lint. We were obliged also to procure a

pass to Keedysville from the Provost Marshal of Boonsborough. As we came

near the place, we learned that General McClellan's head quarters had

been removed from this village some miles farther to the front.

On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a familiar face and

figure blocked the way, like one of Bunyan's giants. The tall form and

benevolent countenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged to the

excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay of Chelsea, who, like my Philanthropist,

only still more promptly, had come to succor the wounded of the great

battle. It was wonderful to see how his single personality pervaded this

torpid little village; he seemed to be the centre of all its activities.

All my questions he answered clearly and decisively, as one who knew

everything that was going on in the place. But the one question I had

come five hundred miles to ask,--Where is Captain H.?--he could not

answer. There were some thousands of wounded in the place, he told me,

scattered about everywhere. It would be a long job to hunt up my

Captain; the only way would be to go to every house and ask for him.

Just then a medical officer came up.

"Do you know anything of Captain H. of the Massachusetts Twentieth?"

"Oh yes; he is staying in that house. I saw him there, doing very well."

A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself. Now,

then, for our twice-wounded volunteer, our young centurion whose

double-barred shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon. Let us

observe the proprieties, however; no swelling upward of the mother,--no

hysterica passio, we do not like scenes. A calm salutation,--then

swallow and hold hard. That is about the programme.

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and whitewashed. A

little yard before it, with a gate swinging. The door of the cottage

ajar,--no one visible as yet. I push open the door and enter. An old

woman, Margaret Kitzmuller her name proves to be, is the first person I

see.

"Captain H. here?"

"Oh no, sir,--left yesterday morning for Hagerstown,--in a milk-cart."

The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking ancient woman, answers

questions with a rising inflection, and gives a good account of the

Captain, who got into the vehicle without assistance, and was in

excellent spirits. Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as the

terminus of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and was on his way to

Philadelphia, via Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already in

the hospitable home of Walnut Street, where his friends were expecting

him.

I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was the

same to Philadelphia through Harrisburg as through Baltimore. But it was

very difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of conveyance to

Hagerstown; and, on the other hand, I had James Grayden and his wagon to

carry me back to Frederick. It was not likely that I should overtake the

object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six hours start, even if I could

procure a conveyance that day. In the mean time James was getting

impatient to be on his return, according to the direction of his

employers. So I decided to go back with him.

But there was the great battle-field only about three miles from

Keedysville, and it was impossible to go without seeing that. James

Grayden's directions were peremptory, but it was a case for the higher

law. I must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours, such as

would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and enforce it by a personal

motive. I did this handsomely, and succeeded without difficulty. To add

brilliancy to my enterprise, I invited the Chaplain and the

Philanthropist to take a free passage with me.

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off to

the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions,

over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek in which

soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did not then

know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we met a

party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had picked up

on the battlefield. Still wandering along, we were at last pointed to a

hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was covered with

Indian corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest fighting of the

day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to make a passage

across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days looked

like old roads. We passed a fresh grave under a tree near the road. A

board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make

it out, of Gardiner, of a New Hampshire regiment.

On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks and

spades. "How many?" "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried, then,

in this region of the field of strife. We stopped the wagon, and,

getting out, began to look around us. Hard by was a large pile of

muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up, and were

guarded for the Government. A long ridge of fresh gravel rose before us.

A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription, the first part of

which was, I believe, not correct: "The Rebel General Anderson and 80

Rebels are buried in this hole." Other smaller ridges were marked with

the number of dead lying under them. The whole ground was strewed with

fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets,

cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat.

I saw two soldiers' caps that looked as though their owners had been shot

through the head. In several places I noticed dark red patches where a

pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life

out on the sod. I then wandered about in the cornfield. It surprised me

to notice, that, though there was every mark of hard fighting having

taken place here, the Indian corn was not generally trodden down. One of

our cornfields is a kind of forest, and even when fighting, men avoid the

tall stalks as if they were trees. At the edge of this cornfield lay a

gray horse, said to have belonged to a Rebel colonel, who was killed near

the same place. Not far off were two dead artillery horses in their

harness. Another had been attended to by a burying-party, who had thrown

some earth over him but his last bed-clothes were too short, and his legs

stuck out stark and stiff from beneath the gravel coverlet. It was a

great pity that we had no intelligent guide to explain to us the position

of that portion of the two armies which fought over this ground. There

was a shallow trench before we came to the cornfield, too narrow for a

road, as I should think, too elevated for a water-course, and which

seemed to have been used as a rifle-pit. At any rate, there had been

hard fighting in and about it. This and the cornfield may serve to

identify the part of the ground we visited, if any who fought there

should ever look over this paper. The opposing tides of battle must have

blended their waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform were

mingled with the "garments rolled in blood" torn from our own dead and

wounded soldiers. I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own,--but

there was something repulsive about the trodden and stained relics of the

stale battle-field. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left

uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and

muddy heeltaps. A bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a

soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos of my visit, with a

letter which I picked up, directed to Richmond, Virginia, its seal

unbroken. "N. C. Cleveland County. E. Wright to J. Wright." On the

other side, "A few lines from W. L. Vaughn." who has just been writing

for the wife to her husband, and continues on his own account. The

postscript, "tell John that nancy's folks are all well and has a verry

good Little Crop of corn a growing." I wonder, if, by one of those

strange chances of which I have seen so many, this number or leaf of the

"Atlantic" will not sooner or later find its way to Cleveland County,

North Carolina, and E. Wright, widow of James Wright, and Nancy's folks,

get from these sentences the last glimpse of husband and friend as he

threw up his arms and fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam? I will

keep this stained letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in

my time, and my pleasant North Carolina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital

will, perhaps look these poor people up, and tell them where to send for

it.

On the battle-field I parted with my two companions, the Chaplain and the

Philanthropist. They were going to the front, the one to find his

regiment, the other to look for those who needed his assistance. We

exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses' heads

were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I saw them

no more. On my way back, I fell into talk with James Grayden. Born in

England, Lancashire; in this country since he was four years old. Had

nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't know what he should do if

he lost her. Though so long in this country, he had all the simplicity

and childlike lightheartedness which belong to the Old World's people.

He laughed at the smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white English

teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very

limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small store of

information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me. His quiet

animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of

anxiety, and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don't know, sir." better than

I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other

very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the

second time. Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded

Colonel and his lady. She gave me a most touching account of all the

suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he succeeded

in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper means of

transportation of the wounded after the battle. It occurred to me, while

at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the first time

in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with whom the

Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth,

educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk.

He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous

Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in

the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch

from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those

frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard,

who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light

of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of

Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the

rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the "sudabit multum."

and others,--also of our New York Professor Carnochan's handiwork, a

specimen of which I once admired at the New York College. But the doctor

was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed willing to forget the

present in the past: things went wrong, somehow, and the time was out of

joint with him.

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own wide

bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in Middletown. Here I

lay awake again another night. Close to the house stood an ambulance in

which was a wounded Rebel officer, attended by one of their own surgeons.

He was calling out in a loud voice, all night long, as it seemed to me,

"Doctor! Doctor! Driver! Water!" in loud, complaining tones, I have no

doubt of real suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent patience

which was the almost universal rule.

The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence,

trivial, but having its interest as one of a series. The Doctor and

myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on the

sofa, At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the

Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau, just

where I could put my hand upon it. I was the last of the three to rise

in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I found it was

gone. This was rather awkward,--not on account of the loss, but of the

unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must have taken it. I

must try to find out what it meant.

"By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern

match-box?"

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise and

my great gratification, pulled out two match-boxes exactly alike, both

printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he

had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into

his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In

memory of which event, we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes.

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases of

plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured. When a

little poem called "The Two Streams" was first printed, a writer in the

New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of it of borrowing

the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President Hopkins of

Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as I

thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as establishing a fair

presumption that it was so borrowed. I was at the same time wholly

unconscious of ever having met with the discourse or the sentence which

the verses were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen or heard

either. Some time after this, happening to meet my eloquent cousin,

Wendell Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that he had

once used the special image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered

at Williamstown. On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he

informed me that he too, had used the image,--perhaps referring to his

poem called "The Twins." He thought Tennyson had used it also. The

parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage

attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript" for

October 23, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the

showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic,

one to the Pacific. I found the image running loose in my mind, without

a halter. It suggested itself as an illustration of the will, and I

worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School Atlas.--The spores of

a great many ideas are floating about in the atmosphere. We no more know

where all the growths of our mind came from, than where the lichens which

eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them

birth. The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was a

plagiarism.

In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of James

Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his name

"Phillip Ottenheimer" and whose features at once showed him to be an

Israelite. I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk. So I

asked him many questions about his religion, and got some answers that

sound strangely in Christian ears. He was from Wittenberg, and had been

educated in strict Jewish fashion. From his childhood he had read

Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar otherwise. A young person of his

race lost caste utterly by marrying a Christian. The Founder of our

religion was considered by the Israelites to have been "a right smart man

and a great doctor." But the horror with which the reading of the New

Testament by any young person of their faith would be regarded was as

great, I judged by his language, as that of one of our straitest

sectaries would be, if he found his son or daughter perusing the "Age of

Reason."

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires

struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find "Fair-View" laid

down about this point on a railroad map. I wish some wandering

photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one, if

possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of steeples

nestles among the Maryland hills. The town had a poetical look from a

distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there. The first sign I

read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as

confirming my remote impression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past,

Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the

attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my

parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as

Spiritus Vini Gallici. I took advantage of General Shriver's always open

door to write a letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered

hospitality. The railroad bridge over the Monocacy had been rebuilt since

I passed through Frederick, and we trundled along over the track toward

Baltimore.

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had ordered

all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic message from

Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had arrived at the former

place, "wound doing well in good spirits expects to leave soon for

Boston." After all, it was no great matter; the Captain was, no doubt,

snugly lodged before this in the house called Beautiful, at * * * *

Walnut Street, where that "grave and beautiful damsel named Discretion"

had already welcomed him, smiling, though "the water stood in her eyes,"

and had "called out Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little

more discourse with him, had him into the family."

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the lady

of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable, and whose

benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the invalids I had

left suffering at Frederick. General Wool still walked the corridors,

inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his

breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind

offices. About the doors of the hotel the news-boys cried the papers in

plaintive, wailing tones, as different from the sharp accents of their

Boston counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern

breeze. To understand what they said was, of course, impossible to any

but an educated ear, and if I made out "Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was

because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising

coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third, there

beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his brave wounded

companions under that roof which covers a household of as noble hearts as

ever throbbed with human sympathies. Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder

Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory has

cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes with

their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,--the broad, the

beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,--the river of

Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where

"Aye those sunny mountains half-way down

Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it lovely

to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified his fame with

the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame forever?" The

prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a great

sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting in the car,

on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's dolphin,--also that

mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the season, and ducks of

lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last! Drive fast, O colored man and brother, to

the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting

for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to his bedside the face

and the voice nearer than any save one to his heart in this his hour of

pain and weakness! Up a long street with white shutters and white steps

to all the houses. Off at right angles into another long street with

white shutters and white steps to all the houses. Off again at another

right angle into still another long street with white shutters and white

steps to all the houses. The natives of this city pretend to know one

street from another by some individual differences of aspect; but the

best way for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from

others is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.

This corner-house is the one. Ring softly,--for the Lieutenant-Colonel

lies there with a dreadfully wounded arm, and two sons of the family, one

wounded like the Colonel, one fighting with death in the fog of a typhoid

fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least sound you can make. I

entered the house, but no cheerful smile met me. The sufferers were each

of them thought to be in a critical condition. The fourth bed, waiting

its tenant day after day, was still empty. Not a word from my Captain.

Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank within me. Had he

been taken ill on the road, perhaps been attacked with those formidable

symptoms which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds that seemed to be

doing well enough, and was his life ebbing away in some lonely cottage,

nay, in some cold barn or shed, or at the wayside, unknown, uncared for?

Somewhere between Philadelphia and Hagerstown, if not at the latter town,

he must be, at any rate. I must sweep the hundred and eighty miles

between these places as one would sweep a chamber where a precious pearl

had been dropped. I must have a companion in my search, partly to help

me look about, and partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely.

Charley said he would go with me,--Charley, my Captain's beloved friend,

gentle, but full of spirit and liveliness, cultivated, social,

affectionate, a good talker, a most agreeable letter-writer, observing,

with large relish of life, and keen sense of humor. He was not well

enough to go, some of the timid ones said; but he answered by packing his

carpet-bag, and in an hour or two we were on the Pennsylvania Central

Railroad in full blast for Harrisburg.

I should have been a forlorn creature but for the presence of my

companion. In his delightful company I half forgot my anxieties, which,

exaggerated as they may seem now, were not unnatural after what I had

seen of the confusion and distress that had followed the great battle,

nay, which seem almost justified by the recent statement that "high

officers" were buried after that battle whose names were never

ascertained. I noticed little matters, as usual. The road was filled in

between the rails with cracked stones, such as are used for macadamizing

streets. They keep the dust down, I suppose, for I could not think of

any other use for them. By and by the glorious valley which stretches

along through Chester and Lancaster Counties opened upon us. Much as I

had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the

uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me. The grazing pastures

were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle

looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the

fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this

region was called the England of Pennsylvania. The people whom we saw

were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked round and

wholesome.

"Grass makes girls." I said to my companion, and left him to work out my

Orphic saying, thinking to myself, that as guano makes grass, it was a

legitimate conclusion that Ichaboe must be a nursery of female

loveliness.

As the train stopped at the different stations, I inquired at each if

they had any wounded officers. None as yet; the red rays of the

battle-field had not streamed off so far as this. Evening found us in

the cars; they lighted candles in spring-candle-sticks; odd enough I

thought it in the land of oil-wells and unmeasured floods of kerosene.

Some fellows turned up the back of a seat so as to make it horizontal,

and began gambling, or pretending to gamble; it looked as if they were

trying to pluck a young countryman; but appearances are deceptive, and no

deeper stake than "drinks for the crowd" seemed at last to be involved.

But remembering that murder has tried of late years to establish itself

as an institution in the cars, I was less tolerant of the doings of these

"sportsmen" who tried to turn our public conveyance into a travelling

Frascati. They acted as if they were used to it, and nobody seemed to

pay much attention to their manoeuvres.

We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the evening, and attempted to

find our way to the Jones House, to which we had been commended. By some

mistake, intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have been, or

purely accidental, we went to the Herr House instead. I entered my name

in the book, with that of my companion. A plain, middle-aged man stepped

up, read it to himself in low tones, and coupled to it a literary title

by which I have been sometimes known. He proved to be a graduate of Brown

University, and had heard a certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered there a

good many years ago. I remembered it, too; Professor Goddard, whose

sudden and singular death left such lasting regret, was the Orator. I

recollect that while I was speaking a drum went by the church, and how I

was disgusted to see all the heads near the windows thrust out of them,

as if the building were on fire. Cedat armis toga. The clerk in the

office, a mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite in his

manners, and did all he could to make us comfortable. He was of a

literary turn, and knew one of his guests in his character of author. At

tea, a mild old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next us. He,

too, had come hunting after his son, a lieutenant in a Pennsylvania

regiment. Of these, father and son, more presently.

After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief medical officer of the

hospitals in the place, who was staying at the Brady House. A

magnificent old toddy-mixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect, as

all grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to dive through the

features of men to the bottom of their souls and pockets to see whether

they are solvent to the amount of sixpence, answered my question by a

wave of one hand, the other being engaged in carrying a dram to his lips.

His superb indifference gratified my artistic feeling more than it

wounded my personal sensibilities. Anything really superior in its line

claims my homage, and this man was the ideal bartender, above all vulgar

passions, untouched by commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the

liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those

lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the

roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the cheap, all-powerful

substitute.

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having

slept for I don't know how many nights.

"Take my card up to him, if you please." "This way, sir."

A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not expected to be as

affable, when attacked in his bed, as a French Princess of old time at

her morning receptions. Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I entered,

without effusion, but without rudeness. His thick, dark moustache was

chopped off square at the lower edge of the upper lip, which implied a

decisive, if not a peremptory, style of character.

I am Dr. So-and-So of Hubtown, looking after my wounded son. (I gave my

name and said Boston, of course, in reality.)

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features

growing cordial. Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly excused

his reception of me. The day before, as he told me, he had dismissed

from the service a medical man hailing from ******, Pennsylvania, bearing

my last name, preceded by the same two initials; and he supposed, when my

card came up, it was this individual who was disturbing his slumbers.

The coincidence was so unlikely a priori, unless some forlorn parent

without antecedents had named, a child after me, that I could not help

cross-questioning the Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact

was just as he had said, even to the somewhat unusual initials. Dr.

Wilson very kindly furnished me all the information in his power, gave me

directions for telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every disposition

to serve me.

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old

gentleman in a very happy state. He had just discovered his son, in a

comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel. He thought that he

could probably give us some information which would prove interesting.

To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in company with our

kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see me as happy as

himself. He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and presently came down

to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P________, of the Pennsylvania __th, was a very fresh,

bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent

injury received in action. A grape-shot, after passing through a post

and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not penetrating or

breaking. He had good news for me.

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through

Harrisburg, going East. He had conversed in the bar-room of this hotel

with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder (it might be the

lower part of the neck), and had his arm in a sling. He belonged to the

Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that he was a Captain, by the

two bars on his shoulder-strap. His name was my family-name; he was tall

and youthful, like my Captain. At four o'clock he left in the train for

Philadelphia. Closely questioned, the Lieutenant's evidence was as

round, complete, and lucid as a Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS! The Lord's name be praised! The dead pain in the

semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of stupid,

unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to man and

beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when the dam loses

her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped short. There was a

feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or cut a strangling

garter,--only it was all over my system. What more could I ask to assure

me of the Captain's safety? As soon as the telegraph office opens

tomorrow morning we will send a message to our friends in Philadelphia,

and get a reply, doubtless, which will settle the whole matter.

The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the message was sent accordingly.

In due time, the following reply was received: "Phil Sept 24 I think the

report you have heard that W [the Captain] has gone East must be an error

we have not seen or heard of him here M L H"

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI! He could not have passed through Philadelphia

without visiting the house called Beautiful, where he had been so

tenderly cared for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those whom

he loved were lying in grave peril of life or limb. Yet he did pass

through Harrisburg, going East, going to Philadelphia, on his way home.

Ah, this is it! He must have taken the late night-train from

Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home. There is such

a train, not down in the guide-book, but we were assured of the fact at

the Harrisburg depot. By and by came the reply from Dr. Wilson's

telegraphic message: nothing had been heard of the Captain at

Chambersburg. Still later, another message came from our Philadelphia

friend, saying that he was seen on Friday last at the house of Mrs.

K________, a well-known Union lady in Hagerstown. Now this could not be

true, for he did not leave Keedysville until Saturday; but the name of

the lady furnished a clew by which we could probably track him. A

telegram was at once sent to Mrs. K_______, asking information. It was

transmitted immediately, but when the answer would be received was

uncertain, as the Government almost monopolized the line. I was, on the

whole, so well satisfied that the Captain had gone East, that, unless

something were heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the

late train leaving a little after midnight for Philadelphia.

This same morning we visited several of the temporary hospitals, churches

and school-houses, where the wounded were lying. In one of these, after

looking round as usual, I asked aloud, "Any Massachusetts men here?" Two

bright faces lifted themselves from their pillows and welcomed me by

name. The one nearest me was private John B. Noyes of Company B,

Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of my old college class-tutor, now the

reverend and learned Professor of Hebrew, etc., in Harvard University.

His neighbor was Corporal Armstrong of the same Company. Both were

slightly wounded, doing well. I learned then and since from Mr. Noyes

that they and their comrades were completely overwhelmed by the

attentions of the good people of Harrisburg,--that the ladies brought

them fruits and flowers, and smiles, better than either,--and that the

little boys of the place were almost fighting for the privilege of doing

their errands. I am afraid there will be a good many hearts pierced in

this war that will have no bulletmark to show.

There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to Camp

Curtin might lighten some of them. A rickety wagon carried us to the

camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a basket of good

things with her for a sick brother. "Poor boy! he will be sure to die,"

she said. The rustic sentries uncrossed their muskets and let us in.

The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with hills, spacious, well kept

apparently, but did not present any peculiar attraction for us. The

visit would have been a dull one, had we not happened to get sight of a

singular-looking set of human beings in the distance. They were clad in

stuff of different hues, gray and brown being the leading shades, but

both subdued by a neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize the

variegated apparel of travel-stained vagabonds. They looked slouchy,

listless, torpid,--an ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of

such fellows as an old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a

broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery army which has given

our generals so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a bystander told

us. A talk with them might be profitable and entertaining. But they

were tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of

the line which separated us from them.

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were referred.

Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for

anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it,

and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit

hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend

as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian

origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch

type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious in the

hold, and calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make fast

time. He must have been in politics at some time or other, for he made

orations to all the "Secesh," in which he explained to them that the

United States considered and treated them like children, and enforced

upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels attempting to do

anything against such a power as that of the National Government.

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered

somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly talk

with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help feeling a kind

of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion as

one is like to find under the stars and stripes. It is fair to take a

man prisoner. It is fair to make speeches to a man. But to take a man

prisoner and then make speeches to him while in durance is not fair.

I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to something

but for the reason assigned.

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay pipe

in his mouth. He was a Scotchman from Ayr, dour enough, and little

disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa Briggs,"

and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns." He professed to

feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting, and was in the

army, I judged, only from compulsion. There was a wild-haired, unsoaped

boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who looked as if he might be

about seventeen, as he said he was. I give my questions and his answers

literally.

"What State do you come from?"

"Georgy."

"What part of Georgia?"

"Midway."

--[How odd that is! My father was settled for seven years as pastor over

the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a grandson

or great grandson of one of his parishioners.]

"Where did you go to church when you were at home?"

"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."

"What did you do before you became a soldier?"