Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/47



waited often at our door. Some lay very low, while every attention which it was possible to give was rendered unto them. Our faithful nurses wrought over the sick-beds with constant fervor. Their names—Jacobs, Gager, Robertson, and Stevens—will always be remembered by me, when somehow I, like the rest of womankind, are apt to forget that men may have tender, sympathetic hearts.

Jacobs' wife came to stay with her husband for a time, and I highly appreciated her society, and realized how much is always lost in the absence of women from any place where human beings congregate.

One young man named Raymond was very low, and in the uncertainty of his recovery we sent for his parents, who came on immediately. I had known them before coming out to the army, and the familiar faces were like a glimpse of home to the heart-sick wanderer.

They remained a week, and left him recovering, but how anxiously their thoughts dwelt around the boy whom they were leaving in the care of soldier nurses—the boy who had never known one hour of sickness,—but his mother was beside him, to smooth