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 may be 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,--a light 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 arranging 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?”

“Nothin'.”

“What do you mean to do when you get back?”

“Nothin'.”

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed,

this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but

one degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--one

button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom.

A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the “subject race” by

any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his exposed surfaces. He

did not say much, possibly because he was convinced by the statements

and arguments of the Dutch captain. He had on strong, iron-heeled shoes,

of English make, which he said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the

prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, “For our homes.”

Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great

indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a

sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory

to those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting

for. A feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such

it could be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence.

It was cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity

from the body politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the

party. “That is the true Southern type,” I said to my companion. A young

fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly

smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine,

almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we

turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the

loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk. He

was from Mississippi, he said, had been at Georgetown College, and was

so far imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility

before him was not new to his ears. Of course I found it easy to come

into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility what

he was fighting for. “Because I like the excitement of it,” he answered.

I know those fighters with women's mouths and boys' cheeks. One such

from the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped away from

his nursery, and dashed in under, an assumed name among the red-legged

Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the

earliest conflicts of the war.

“Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?” said my Philadelphia friend to the

young Mississippian.

“I have shot at a good many of them,” he replied, modestly, his woman's

mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his

ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs

of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for

the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there

was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into

the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking how

much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with

unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it

would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair

proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him

before he had time to say dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message.

Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us

hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but

of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but

ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his

broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on

one side,--a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified

person like him, business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted

while occupied with another, but giving himself up heartily to the

claimant who held him for the time. He was so genial, so cordial, so

encouraging, that it seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all

the morning, broke away as we came into his presence, and the sunshine

of his large nature filled the air all around us. He took the matter in

hand at once, as if it were his own private affair. In ten minutes he

had a second telegraphic message on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown,

sent through the Government channel from the State Capitol,--one so

direct and urgent that I should be sure of an answer to it, whatever

became of the one I had sent in the morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an

odd young native, neither boy nor man, “as a codling when 't is almost

an apple,” who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled

faintly at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion,

and a gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in the

atmosphere of horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white

with tents, which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in

huge letters, thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S HOLE, and

similar inscriptions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which

looks upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common, and shows a long front

of handsome houses with fair gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile

across here, but very shallow now. The codling told us that a Rebel spy

had been caught trying its fords a little while ago, and was now at Camp

Curtin with a heavy ball chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a

lie, Dr. Wilson said. A little farther along we came to the barkless

stump of the tree to which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named

after him, was tied by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of

scalping or roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who

paddled across the stream to save him. Our youngling pointed out a very

respectable-looking stone house as having been “built by the Indians”

about those times. Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions and

dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.

“Who are those?” I said to my conductor.

“Them?” he answered. “Them's the men that's been out West, out to

Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin.”

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever

it is called, seems most worth notice. Its facade is imposing, with a

row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a

crag over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower floor only appeared

to be open to the public. Its tessellated pavement and ample courts

suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel

uncrowded at their devotions; but from appearances about the place where

the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked the officiating priest

for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not

be unanswered. The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had

once looked upon,--the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua. It was the same

thing in Italy and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum,

and calls it a place of entertainment. The fragrance of innumerable

libations and the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall

ascend day and night through the arches of his funereal monument. What

are the poor dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that

stand at the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to

this perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching. The telegraph office would

presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown. Let

us step over and see for ourselves. A message! A message!

“Captain H. still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is

doing well Mrs HK--.”

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the

hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or,

if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently

narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber

like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over-tense nerves

are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over

one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes

the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost

fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was

so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently

confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging

from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer

that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as

I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with

protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers

are supposed to possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of

his ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no

means the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I

had nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest

consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday. The train from

Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A. M: We took another ride behind the

codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again. Being in

a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the

town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as

seen by the different lights of evening and morning. After this, we

visited the school-house hospital. A fine young fellow, whose arm had

been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lock-jaw. The beads

of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and contracted features.

He was under the effect of opiates,--why not (if his case was desperate,

as it seemed to be considered) stop his sufferings with chloroform? It

was suggested that it might shorten life. “What then?” I said. “Are a

dozen additional spasms worth living for?”

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went

to the station. I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to

me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round.

Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed

a car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine,

without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so

silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near

it came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel

pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The

train was late,--fifteen minutes, half an hour late, and I began to get

nervous, lest something had happened. While I was looking for it,

out started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was

expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked

an employee of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few

minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train

with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and

answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did

occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least

eleven persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and

crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected

train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the

track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;

there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many

cities.

“How are you, Boy?”

“How are you, Dad?”

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us

Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those

natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep

aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which

had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell

on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the

women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with

sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a

drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or

griefs. I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice

addressed me by name. I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed

in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time. I should have

yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might

well call forth.

“You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once

in Boston?”

“I do remember him well.”

“He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I am carrying his body back

with me on this train. He was my only child. If you could come to my

house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a pleasure to

me.”

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a “New

System of Latin Paradigms,” a work showing extraordinary scholarship and

capacity. It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and

I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth. Some time

afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to

President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course

of independent study he was proposing to himself. I was most happy to

smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and

express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed

at Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a

trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never

saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his

mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer

would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few

words spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's

chambers. For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of

contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to

me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must

now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil

sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed

the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has

died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation

and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded

soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come

once more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same

region I had left! No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart

warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought

of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by

Evangeline upon the great river. Ah, me! if that railroad crash had been

a few hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so

close to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough.

The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once

for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I took it

for granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some

ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity,

and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their

invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion

was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some

of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares,

and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the

piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,--and all this after the

swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the

dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting

ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart! Thanks, uncounted

thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him

from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite

bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well

under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging

everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time

and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house

of the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind

companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these

benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was

no longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were Kool Slaa and

Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet,

simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant

of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in

that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known

to his household as “Tines” to a huckleberry with features. He also

approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom

we passed in the street and the “Morris White” peach. But he was so

good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it

as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside

of that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the

country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by

its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our

economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences,

and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American

city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. Many of its characteristics

are accounted for to some extent by its geographical position. It is the

great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of

the South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer

limits, and result in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor

turmeric brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving

out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered

its famous water-works. In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and

it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that

perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same

systole and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in

my own heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism. But in the place of

“Pratt's Garden” was an open park, and the old house where Robert

Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public

restaurant. A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill

where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a single bound,--an

arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us, than was ever before

constructed. The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the

Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an air of dash about it

which went far towards redeeming the dead level of respectable average

which flattens the physiognomy of the rectangular city. Philadelphia

will never be herself again until another Robert Mills and another Lewis

Wernwag have shaped her a new palladium. She must leap the Schuylkill

again, or old men will sadly shake their heads, like the Jews at the

sight of the second temple, remembering the glories of that which it

replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not

charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same

Friday evening. The “opera-house” was spacious and admirably ventilated.

As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to

cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window

a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange

intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces.

I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but “Bones” was

irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the

blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed

uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr.

Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore

Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious

look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and

meant to do it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch

spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with

no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I

saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I

am not quite sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure

of the kind I have ever seen,--each length being of a special pattern,

ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown.

I trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me,

to go with the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as

mementos of my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people

whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time

or other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming

a group by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on

inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit

as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one

delivered at New Haven. The party were very courteous and friendly, and

contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people

in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then

before them, like the “army” in a beggarly stage-show. Suppose that

I should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this

everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a

ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a

seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor.

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's Bluff accident, the

Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our

homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the

ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate

this time, the house being really very full. Farther from the flowers

and nearer to the stars,--to reach the neighborhood of which last the

per ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any

mortal, wounded or well.

The “vertical railway” settled that for us, however. It is a giant

corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine

judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This

ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned

seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors,

one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels

that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's. My

Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards.

I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested

at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds the citizens had

been arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen. The Central Park

is an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to form ridges which

will give views and hollows that will hold water. The hips and elbows

and other bones of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of rocks

which give character to the scenery, and an unchangeable, unpurchasable

look to a landscape that without them would have been in danger of being

fattened by art and money out of all its native features. The roads were

fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans

elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast

horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by

clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,--but it

cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of

Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends

on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as

Brookline is central to Boston.

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but remote

pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between

his Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its

artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond. I say

this not invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our

own metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either

of the great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public

Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage

of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in

plainer clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald

on her right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not

be ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for

home. Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling

houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford: then

NORWALK. Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels

of the great disaster. But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my

readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my

friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave

them hanging over the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey

of two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its

phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown

again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes

cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that

look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about

for balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with

a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so

murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the

frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its neat

carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories,

its vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows; Hartford,

substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every conical spire an

extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so onward, by and across

the broad, shallow Connecticut,--dull red road and dark river woven

in like warp and woof by the shuttle of the darting engine;

then Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving,

hot-summered, giant-treed town,--city among villages, village

among cities; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of crossing

railroad-bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke

and hot vapors, are stabled in their dens; Framingham, fair cup-bearer,

leaf-cinctured Hebe of the deep-bosomed Queen sitting by the seaside on

the throne of the Six Nations. And now I begin to know the road, not by

towns, but by single dwellings; not by miles, but by rods. The poles of

the great magnet that draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves

of all the mountains must be near at hand, for here are crossings, and

sudden stops, and screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The

tall granite obelisk comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled

cap-stone sharp against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and

East Cambridge flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now

one fair bosom of the three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit,

reveals itself, as when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with

half-open chlamys before her worshippers.

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters

and towards the western sun! Let the joyous light shine in upon the

pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the

names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our

boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side

of honor and of duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his

aches and weariness. So comes down another night over this household,

unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings,--a night of peaceful rest and

grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive

again, and was lost and is found.