Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/151

Rh necessary for a steady hand over the distressing wounds which I dressed daily.

The Christian Commission built a church, and sometimes of an evening I would sit within it, with head bowed down, listening to prayer and hymn, and wondering if I was at home again, in the little gray church under the hill-side pastures, and if those men whose voices were raised in exhortation, were our neighbors and our friends, fresh from the clover fields which I knew then were red with many blossoms, and the bees were humming over them in the drowsy afternoons.

I could cheat my heart awhile—I liked to think of the ripple of the brook plashing over the white stones, moistening beds of spongy moss, and scattering drops of dew on bending brake, and lonely water-weed. I was a child again—taking the wood-path to the school-house, looking up into the tall trees with feelings akin to worship, and tracing the sun's witchery through the quivering leaves, down into the dark brown mould, grown so rich with the decay of centuries. The quiet way—the hushed repose of the country in the summer sunshine, came with sweeping force upon me, and with a wild rush of feeling I lifted up my head to see blue army uniforms about me—crutches leaning against the bare walls, and I realized that I was an army nurse, down near the battle-fields, where "It was no place for women."

We had a reading-room attached to the same benevolent Commission, and the studious convalescent could lose himself and his misery in the pages of