Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/31

Rh On the battle-field they fell, in tented hospitals, within noisome prison-pens breathed out the last breath of life, and counted it no loss if the glorious stars and stripes could but follow in the path which they helped to clear with tired, blistered feet, and blood dropping from throbbing wounds.

Should traitors again assay to grasp the helm of state, and the cry go up for succor, while the legions of young men spring armed from the North, let there be no words of sneering spoken to keep back those whose hearts go out with them, and who would gladly leave home, and friends, and comfort, to follow the brave one to the battle, and bind up his wounds when the day was won, and his life fast ebbing away with the gory stream, drawing, with every shifting sand, nearer and nearer the fountain. Let no one say, if war and its attendant sufferings be Christian, that where men are in the midst of the dreadful work, "it is no place for women."

The One Hundred and Ninth had been gone two weeks, and I did not care to leave till the change and exposure to which the raw regiment was unused had wrought sickness, and made my presence needed; and September 3d, 1862, I left Ithaca, N. Y., in company with one of our men, who had returned with the body of a comrade, killed by the cars while on guard-duty along the railroad, at Laurel Station, Md.

It was one of those rare mornings peculiar to that beautiful month. Deliciously cool, with soft breezes whispering in the tree-tops, then sweeping low to shake from the grass-blades a million of diamond