TRUE heroine of the war was Margaret Elizabeth Breckinridge. Patient, courageous, self-forgetting, steady of purpose and cheerful in spirit, she belonged by nature to the heroic order, while all the circumstances of her early life tended to mature and prepare her for her destined work. Had her lot been cast in the dark days of religious intolerance and persecution, her steadfast enthusiasm and holy zeal would have earned for her a martyr's cross and crown; but, born in this glorious nineteenth century, and reared in an atmosphere of liberal thought and active humanity, the first spark of patriotism that flashed across the startled North at the outbreak of the rebellion, set all her soul aglow, and made it henceforth an altar of living sacrifice, a burning and a shining light, to the end of her days. Dearer to her gentle spirit than any martyr's crown, must have been the consciousness that this Godgiven light had proved a guiding beacon to many a faltering soul feeling its way into the dim beyond, out of the drear loneliness of camp or hospital. With her slight form, her bright face, and her musical voice, she seemed a ministering angel to the sick and suffering soldiers, while her sweet womanly purity and her tender devotion to their wants made her almost an object of worship among them. "Ain't she an angel ?" said a gray-headed soldier as he watched her one morning as she was busy getting breakfast for the boys on the steamer "City of Alton." "She never seems to tire, she is always smiling, and don't seem to walk-she flies,

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,

but, when we think of Margaret's pure voice, singing hymns with the soldiers on the hospital-boat, filling the desolate woods along the Mississippi shores with solemn music in the still night, we feel that it belongs especially to her and that we may call her, without offense to the others, our Florence Nightingale.

Her great power of adaptation served her well in her chosen vocation. Unmindful of herself, and always considerate of others, she could suit herself to the need of the moment and was equally at home in making tea and toast for the hungry, dressing ghastly wounds for the sufferers, and in singing hymns and talking of spiritual things with the sick and dying.

She found indeed her true vocation. She saw her way and walked fearlessly in it; she knew her work and did it with all her heart and soul. When she first began to visit the hospitals in and around St. Louis, she wrote "I shall never be satisfied till I get right into a hospital, to live till the war is over. If you are constantly with the men, you have hundreds of opportunities and moments of influence in which you can gain their attention and their hearts, and do more good than in any missionary field.” Once, on board a steamer near Vicksburg, during the fearful winter siege of that city, some one said to her, "You must hold back, you are going beyond your strength, you will die if you are not more prudent!" "Well," said she, with thrilling earnestness, "what if I do? Shall men come here by tens of thousands and fight, and suffer, and die, and shall not some women be willing to die to sustain and succor them?" No wonder that such sincerity won all hearts and carried all before it! Alas! the brave spirit was stronger than the frail casket that encased it, and that yielded inevitably to the heavy demands that were made upon it.

A rare and consistent life was hers, a worthy and heroic death. Let us stop a moment to admire the truth and beauty of the one, and to do reverence to the deep devotion of the other. The following sketch is gathered from the pages of a "Memorial" pub