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310 by the side of those whom they nursed—martyrs to the cause of liberty as well as the men who fell in the defense of freedom and the Union. Rev. Doctor Bellows, referring to them and their noble work, said: "A grander collection of women, whether considered in their intellectual or moral qualities, their heads or their hearts, I have not had the happiness of knowing, than the women I saw in the hospitals. They were the flower of their sex. Great as were the labors of those who superintended the operations at home of collecting and preparing supplies for the hospitals and the fields, I cannot but think that the women who lived in the hospitals or among the soldiers required a force of character and a glow of devotion and self-sacrifice of a rarer kind. They were the heroines. They conquered their feminine sensibility at the sight of blood and wounds, lived coarsely and dressed and slept rudely; they studied the caprices of men to whom their ties were simply humane—men often ignorant, feeble-minded, out of their senses, raving with pain and fever; they had a still harder service in bearing with the pride, the official arrogance and the hardness or the folly, perhaps the impertinence and presumption, of half-trained medical men, whom the urgencies of the case had fastened on the service. Nothing in the power of the nation to give or to say can ever compare for a moment with the proud satisfaction which every brave soldier who has ever risked his life for his country ever after carries in his heart of hearts; and no public recognition, no thanks from a saved nation can ever add anything of much importance to the rewards of those who tasted the actual joy of ministering with their own hands and hearts to the wants of our sick and dying men."

It, nevertheless, is to our great regret that only the biographies of those nurses whose services were most conspicuous can be included in this volume. In place of the longer mention