poison steal up towards his vitals, grasping and deadening new tissues each hour. It proved too fearful for even the strong man, who to his physicians had uttered no cry or complaint; and his mind fled for relief to insanity. As we approached, he fixed a pair of cold, despairing eyes upon us, and exclaimed, pointing back over his shoulder, 'Do you see him, -Old Death, there,―sitting on the head-board and laughing? A grim army joker, in truth. The other night I felt a cold touch, and it woke me. The moon flung in a bar of light, and I saw Old Death feeling of my wound. The icy touch numbed it; and the next time I woke, his hand was closer to my body. So it goes; and he will soon be pulling on my heart-chords.' The maniac then stopped, as if for the purpose of reflecting, and during our stay would part of the time be musing, part laughing, occasionally breaking out with the exclamation, 'I plead to him that they would be lonely at the old home. A wife and child are pleasanter than a tomb.' "And so we left him,—the utter corruption, the rottenness of the tomb, and the vitality of a great man, joined in one being, grappling upon the hospital-bed. Life, with the full, strong pulse of thirty years, had marshalled its forces, been defeated, and was retreating upon its citadel, pursued by the decay-growth of a few days. The arteries would soon, stung by the poison-tide, stagnate and block up the gates of the heart. His name was C. P. Dunster, from Illinois, I believe; but the regiment he belonged to I have forgotten." A noble young fellow in one of the hospitals had been injured by the passage of a shell near his head. He scarcely thought of it at the time. But shortly after, a solid shot carried his left arm away. He was well treated on the field, and sent on to Washington for recovery. Here the effect of the concussion of that screaming shell began to show itself on the brain. He became delirious. Watching by him one night, I took down some strange ravings:—“No! I won't go home till the Union is safe. I had rather die here by the roots of this tree, and dig my own grave, than have any croaker in Wisconsin say that I let the old flag drop. Not I! Bring it out! Let me see it once more! I'm ready for the last charge! I don't care how strong they are! I only want one more chance at the rebels." And, lifting himself in bed, he plunged forward. I caught him, and laid him down. A quiver went through his body, and the pulse stopped! "He slept his last sleep,-he had fought his last battle: Another youthful soldier, slowly coming up from what he called "that Chickahominy fever." "Don't you ever get disheartened?" "Yes, once in a while, about myself, while I am alone here after midnight. It seems so long before daylight. I never was sick before. But disheartened about our great cause? Never! If I live, I shall stand by the flag. Why shouldn't I do it as well as any other man? But if all our army sinks into the earth, the cause is just as safe as ever. God cannot afford to let this country go down." Another still, in the same ward: ***We are A vigorous man, with both legs off, but doing well. "God is always right, and we are generally wrong. not ready yet for restoration. We are not ready yet for the redemption which I am sure is coming. *** I went with the Breckinridge party in the last election, for I thought they would stand by the Union as it was when Clay and Webster died. But I was awfully mistaken. They never wanted to remain with us. They embraced the first plausible pretext for separation. The leaders of this rebellion deliberately cheated and deceived us. General Butler, who presided over their convention, was among the first to discover that he and all the old Northern Democrats had been duped,-cruelly, foully, meanly duped. *** When we National Democrats looked about and found out just where we were standing and where the country was falling, we were confronted with the cause, the occasion, and the pretext of all this treason and all this trouble. *** The South saw no use in the Union except as an instrument for the protection and spread of slavery. Mankind had taken a very different view. liberty the rule, and slavery the exception. human family, had got tired of servitude. It was supposed that America was too large, too free, for any thing but freedom. *** We had to come to the conclusion that it wouldn't pay to keep slavery up any longer; and I believe this is the feeling generally in the Army of the Potomac. *** So far as I am concerned, slavery must hereafter take care of itself." * * * * * We considered The world, as a * The battle of Williamsburg was over, the rebels driven from the field, the war-storm hushed, and the sad duty of burying our dead and caring for our wounded remained to be performed. Groping our way through the darkness, we came upon the body of a pale, slender, beardless boy, a member of Company I, 37th Regiment, New York Volunteers,-one of hundreds who left their beautiful hill-girt homes in Cattaraugus county to battle for their country's integrity. We raised him up; he was not dead, but badly wounded. On carrying him to our improvised hospital, the surgeon pronounced his wound mortal. No sigh nor groan escaped his lips; although, from the nature of the wound, he suffered greatly. As firm and brave as but a few hours before, when he met the enemy, he now met the great conqueror, Death. When told he must soon die, and asked if he desired to send any message to his family, his mild blue eye lit up with unnatural fire; and, after a moment's pause, as if recalling his departing senses, he exclaimed, "Tell them I died fighting for the Stars and Stripes." These were his last words; and in a few moments LAFAYETTE MORROW, the boy-hero, was at rest.* During the desperate fight at Williamsburg, while the color-company of the 57th New York went rushing through the blood and over the bodies of the dying and dead to take the place of a New Jersey regiment which had fallen back half slaughtered, one gallant fellow, who had been carried to the rear, was seen leaning against a tree, swinging one bleeding arm, while the other hung shattered and dangling by his side, screaming out, in his wild death-agony, "There goes the old flag! Hold her up, boys, forever!" And he fell, a senseless, gory mass, at the roots of the tree. In returning from the field from which the rebels had been driven, two men from the same regiment left the ranks to look after the dead soldier. They dug his grave where he lay; and long before now "the oak hath shot his roots abroad and pierced his mould." *This fact is related to me by one of the noblest young assistant surgeons in the army. XXV The Doom of the Rebellion. How is it to end? As all the other great wrongs of the world have ended,— not in blood merely; for men spill that freer than water over trifles, but by exterminating the power and the works of the wrong-doer, and, if necessary, the wrong-doer himself. This does not mean half as much as GOD means when HE has traitors to deal with. History, the sacred chronicler from the grave, is Heaven's secretary. Open his books, and see how the Ruler of nations treats bad leaders of communities and empires. What became of a polluted world when its Maker could find no place in his great heart to screen or hold its bad people any longer? He drowned them! What became of his own chosen people, for whom he had wrought miracles by land and water, to whom he had committed his holy tabernacle,—the evidence of his divine presence by night and day in the everlasting flame, that never ceased to burn over the altar of his holy temple, telling that the Protector of Israel was there,—his chosen people, on whom HE had lavished the wealth of his kingdom, and to whom he at last gave the most precious gem in his diadem, his "eternally begotten and well-beloved Son"? Read the fate of that chosen people wherever the winds of heaven sweep, and, innumerable although they be, they are among the nations only the chaff on the summer threshing-floor. What became of the Egyptian tyrant after he rejected the |