[266] The next day he wrote from Washington:—
I am here to see about my exchange, &c. I am sorry you had so much anxiety about me, but thankful to be able to relieve it. My reception by the regiment is reward enough. I must get back to them.His return was long delayed; and of all the trials of his life, this was the greatest. ‘This is not the life for me,’ he said repeatedly, during the weeks when he was flattered and caressed at home. A still severer trial awaited him. On Monday, A. M., August 11th, the day on which his exchange was effected, he heard of the battle of Cedar Mountain, in which his regiment had lost so heavily. Every true soldier can appreciate the bitterness of his feeling, at hearing that his regiment had been in action without him. The loss of his friends who had fallen cut him to the heart. He suffered as he had never suffered before. Some hours were given to visiting the friends of the wounded and the killed, and to making arrangements for serving them. Then he left us, never again to return. He had repeatedly said that he did not expect to come back. Those who met him that morning saw in his face what he felt. To more than one he said in parting, ‘It is the last time.’ Yet he was not depressed by the thought. ‘My life is God's care, not mine,’ he often said; ‘and I am perfectly willing to leave it in his hands.’ Now his only desire was to rejoin the regiment, and, as he said, ‘help those poor fellows.’ On reaching their camp, near Culpeper, he writes:—
A sharp, sudden half-hour's work, under desperate circumstances, has crippled us sadly, as you must have heard only too well. . . . . Our five brave, honorable, beloved dead are on their way to Massachusetts. She has no spot on her soil too sacred for them, no page in her history that their names will not brighten. The regiment looks well, but oh, so gloomy! . . . . As for myself, I look forward.Soon after this, a prohibition was put upon the mails, and no letter reached us from him until September 3d, when he wrote from Washington:—
