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said all they could in opposition.
She listened, and delayed, but finally felt that she must yield to the impulse.
The opposition was withdrawn, and on the last of October, 1861, she started for St. Louis to enter the hospitals there.
Her heart was very desolate as she entered this strange city alone, at ten o'clock at night.
Mr. Yeatman, with whom communication had been opened relative to her coming, had neglected to give her definite directions how to proceed.
But she heard some surgeons talking of the hospitals, and learned that they belonged to them.
From them she obtained the address of Mr. Yeatman.
A gentleman, as she left the cars, stepped forward and kindly and respectfully placed her in the omnibus which was to take her across the river.
She turned to thank him, but he was gone.
Yet these occurrences, small as they were, had given her renewed courage-she no longer felt quite friendless, but went cheerfully upon her way.
She proceeded to the Fifth Street Hospital, where Mr. Yeatman had his quarters, and was admitted by the use of his name.
The night nurse, Mrs. Gibson, took kind charge of her for that night, and in the morning she was introduced to the matron, Mrs. Plummer, and to Mr. Yeatman.
She had her first sight of wounded men on the night of her arrival, and the thought of their sufferings, and of how much could be done to alleviate them, made her forget herself, an obliviousness from which she did not for weeks recover.
She was assigned to the first ward in which there had been till then no female nurse, and soon found full employment for hands, mind and heart.
The reception room for patients was on the same floor with her ward, and the sufferers had to be taken through it to reach the others, so that she was forced to witness every imaginable phase of suffering and misery, and her sympathies never became blunted.
Many of these men lived but a short time after being brought in, and one man standing with his knapsack on to have his name and regiment noted down, fell to
1867.
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