Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/106

72 Our hospital lay on the same uneven ground, and many were very sick, and some dying, with no beds or hammocks on which to breathe out the last sigh. I was so weary I could hardly drag my footsteps thither; but meeting with some of our old hospital cooks, who hailed from the Granite State, they soon made me a cup of coffee, and I went to the tent assigned me, and with my head pillowed on a corn-hill, and my back curved in the exact hollow of the contiguous row, I tried to sleep, and forget how weary I could become.

The dews were like a drenching shower—feet and clothing were heavy with the moisture, which clung to us persistently, waiting for the hot sun to dry it away. It was a great discomfort to us, as we walked from tent to tent, our hoopless skirts clinging so closely to the figure as to impede our progress.

The agents of the Sanitary Commission were then at work with their usual force and energy, and as the wounded were brought in daily, no one can tell the amount of suffering which they helped to allay.

Oh, those little streams rippling down from every town and hamlet in the North, sending their precious contents into the broad bosom of the Sanitary Commission, how we contrasted them with the dews of heaven, which through the tender grass blades in lovely vale and on wooded hill, find the way to the lagging brooks, and thence to river and sea. The little stores which came from the loneliest farm-house, where the old wife knit and dreamed of the soldier whose feet should be encased in the socks her fingers