iced in her deliverance, through the power of God, who had sent that little champion of his cause, in our direst extremity, to the battle.
Since then the Merrimack has not shown herself; and the enemy confess her disabled, and her commander, Buchanan,— ominous name,— severely wounded, four of her crew killed, and seventeen wounded.
The regiment occupied Norfolk and Portsmouth and Suffolk for a time; then joined the Peninsular army, and had war and suffering in earnest, being attached to Hooker's division.
Chaplain Fuller had just obtained a furlough, but refused to avail himself of it. Their first serious skirmish was on June 19, near the scene of the battle of Fair Oaks.
When the regiment was ordered out, the Chaplain was lying in his tent, suffering with a severe sick-headache.
Hearing one of the soldiers say, in passing near the tent, that he wished he had a sick-headache, the Chaplain at once rose, went to the field, and happening to get under a dangerous cross-fire, behave
After a crossing was effected, he participated with his regiment in the fighting and labors of the 3d and 4th of May, and on the 5th recrossed.
On reaching this side, he writes, the excitement and nerve that had sustained me through the entire affair left me, and I was entirely exhausted, and was ordered to fall out and have my things carried, and told to take my own time to reach the camp.
I have been unable to do anything since I returned.
When in June, 1863, the army moved, under Hooker towards Maryland, he was sent, against his own will and protestations, to the hospital at Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, being almost entirely disabled with fever and ague, and rheumatism.
From here he writes:—
Sometimes I feel very hopeful, and feel that the time will be short before I return once more to active service; then perhaps the very next day I feel discouraged, and fear that I shall never again face the foe. . . . . It is the first time I have been sick to amount to anything