Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/85

Rh mortal. He was young—too young to die away from the kind attentions of mother, and sisters, of whom he talked to me in the lull of his pain. He told me also of one other who was waiting for her soldier to return, that life might be crowned by the joys of his constant presence.

We knew he could not live, but he was full of hope, and when the numbness of death crept over him, soothing his anguished senses, he said, "Now I can go to sleep, and shall waken much better."

He dropped into an easy slumber, and did waken better—he wakened in a land where there is no more pain or sighing—no battle-grounds strewed with shattered wrecks of mortality, and we closed his eyes, thinking how dreadful the tidings would come to that peaceful village in the North—to mother, sister, and beloved, when they knew he for whom they prayed "died of his wounds after the battle was over."

In my nervous anxiety to find my own regiment, I could not rest after the death-scene was over, and went out in search of something to lead me to them, if they were yet reported as being in.

I had walked only a short distance, when a familiar voice called "Aunt Becky," and I turned to greet Col. Tracy, who was ill and suffering extremely. To my trembling inquiry after the One Hundred and Ninth, he said, "They are badly cut up," and with the dread of meeting those brave men, mutilated and nigh to death, I proceeded on my search.

Going in the open door of a church, I found one of our boys, Fred Bills, with a mortal wound, and