"THEY'VE come! they've come! hurry up, ladies-you're wanted.""Who have come? the rebels?"This sudden summons in the gray dawn was somewhat startling to a three days' nurse like myself, and, as the thundering knock came at our door, I sprang up in my bed, prepared"To gird my woman's form,And on the ramparts die,"if necessary; but my room-mate took it more coolly, and, as she began a rapid toilet, answered my bewildered question,-"Bless you, no child; it's the wounded from Fredericksburg; forty ambulances are at the door, and we shall have our hands full in fifteen minutes.""What shall we have to do?""Wash, dress, feed, warm and nurse them for the next three months, I dare say. Eighty beds are ready, and we were getting impatient for the men to come. Now you will [Page 32] begin to see hospital life in earnest, for you won't probably find time to sit down all day, and may think yourself fortunate if you get to bed by midnight. Come to me in the ball-room when you are ready; the worst cases are always carried there, and I shall need your help."So saying, the energetic little woman twirled her hair into a button at the back of her head, in a "cleared for action" sort of style, and vanished, wrestling her way into a feminine kind of pea-jacket as she went.

I am free to confess that I had a realizing sense of the fact that my hospital bed was not a bed of roses just then, or the prospect³ before me one of unmingled rapture⁶. My three days' experiences had begun with a death, and, owing to the defalcation⁷ of another nurse, a somewhat abrupt⁸ plunge⁹ into the superintendence of a ward¹⁰ containing forty beds, where I spent my shining hours washing faces, serving rations¹¹, giving medicine, and sitting in a very hard chair, with pneumonia¹² on one side, diptheria on the other, five typhoids on the opposite, and a dozen dilapidated

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