The soldier's wife.
--Under the heading of ‘"stray topics,"’ the New York Express says it is impossible yet to realize that we are in the midst of a civil war; that the disasters and horrors we have been wont to read of in our histories, and to thank heaven that we were spared from, are to come to us; that brothers in blood are to fight on different sides; that those we have called our dearest friends are become our national enemies; that the struggles of patriotism with domestic feelings are to be made familiar to our firesides.
Yet incidents like one that we read of in the correspondence of a contemporary must soon be common; intermarriages between the North and South have been so usual that some of us have as many connexions in one part of the country as in the other.
‘"There is a young merchant in
Charleston, who has a beautiful wife, born at the
North, but who believes, as all good wives should do, that whatever her lord does is right.
When the seven twelve-pounders boomed forth, and he was torn from her lingering embrace, she bade her little boy, with a cheerful face, tell his papa good-bye, and go with a brave heart to
Morris' Island, and not to come back with a shot in his back.
She parted from him with a stoical calmness with her child in her arms, but when he had left she swooned away, and remained in a fainting condition all night.
The first question in the morning was; 'Did he see me tremble or hesitate when I bade him fare-well?'"’ There will be plenty of opportunity for heroism in wives and daughters and sisters, as well as in husbands and fathers and brothers, before our present troubles are past.
