"HE FOUGHT MIT SIEGEL."--A HOSPITAL SCENE AT NIGHT.--ADMINISTERING
ANGELS.--"WATER! WATER!"--THE SOLDIER-BOY'S DYING MESSAGE.--THE
WELL-WORN BIBLE.--WARM HEARTS IN FROZEN BODIES.--"PUDDING AND
MILK."--THE POETICAL AND AMUSING SIDE.--"TO AMELIA."--MY LOVE AND
I.--A SCRIPTURAL CONUNDRUM.--MARRYING A REGIMENT.
I met him again; he was trudging along,
His knapsack with chickens was swelling;
He'd "blenkered" these dainties, and thought it no wrong,
From some secessionist's dwelling.
"What regiment's yours, and under whose flag
Do you fight?" said I, touching his shoulder;
Turning slowly about, he smilingly said,--
For the thought made him stronger and bolder,--
"I fights mit Siegel."
The next time I saw him, his knapsack was gone,
His cap and his canteen were missing;
Shell, shrapnell, and grape, and the swift rifle-ball,
Around him and o'er him were hissing.
"How are you, my friend, and where have you been?
And for what, and for whom, are you fighting?"
He said, as a shell from the enemy's gun
Sent his arm and his musket a-kiting,
"I fights mit Siegel."
We scraped out his grave, and he dreamlessly sleeps
On the bank of the Shenandoah River;
His home and his kindred alike are unknown,
His reward in the hands of the Giver.
We placed a rough board at the head of his grave,
"And we left him alone in his glory,"
But on it we cut, ere we turned from the spot,
The little we knew of his story--
"I fights mit Siegel."--GRANT P. ROBINSON.
If any of the little "life stories" which I here relate in this brief
chapter, have perchance before met the reader's eye, I can only say that
they cannot be read too often. We need no longer go back to remotest
history--to Joan d'Arc, Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale, nor to
revolutionary scenes--to find "cases of courage and devotion, for no
annals are so rich as ours in these deliberate acts of unquestioning
self-sacrifice, which at once ennoble our estimate of human nature, and
increase the homage we pay to the virtues of women."