L. P. Brockett, Women's work in the civil war: a record of heroism, patriotism and patience

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“ [188] all but-God bless her!” Another, a soldier boy of seventeen said to her, as she was smoothing his hair and saying cheering words about mother and home to him, “Ma'am, where do you come from? How could such a lady as you are come down here, to take care of us poor, sick, dirty boys?” She answered-“I consider it an honor to wait on you, and wash off the mud you've waded through for me.”

Another asked this favor of her, “Lady, please write down your name, and let me look at it, and take it home, to show my wife who wrote my letters, and combed my hair and fed me. I don't believe you're like other people.” In one of her letters she says, “I am often touched with their anxiety not to give trouble, not to bother, as they say. That same evening I found a poor, exhausted fellow, lying on a stretcher, on which he had just been brought in. There was no bed for him just then, and he was to remain there for the present, and looked uncomfortable enough, with his knapsack for a pillow. ‘I know some hot tea will do you good,’ I said. ‘Yes, ma'am,’ he answered, ‘but I am too weak to sit up with nothing to lean against; it's no matter,don't bother about me,’ but his eyes were fixed longingly on the smoking tea. Everybody was busy, not even a nurse in sight, but the poor man must have his tea. I pushed away the knapsack, raised his head, and seated myself on the end of the stretcher; and, as I drew his poor tired head back upon my shoulder and half held him, he seemed, with all his pleasure and eager enjoyment of the tea, to be troubled at my being so bothered with him. He forgot I had come so many hundred miles on purpose to be bothered.”

One can hardly read this simple unaffected statement of hers, without instinctively recalling the touching story told of a soldier in one of the hospitals of the Crimea who, when Florence Nightingale had passed, turned and kissed the place upon his pillow where her shadow fell. The sweet name of the fair English nurse might well be claimed by many of our American heroines,