And again he burst out, all a-tremble,—

In thy mercy, O God! let me die!"

Pass on! It is useless to linger

While others are claiming your care; There is need of your delicate finger,

For your womanly sympathy, there!
There are sick ones athirst for caressing-
There are dying ones raving of home-
There are wounds to be bound with a blessing—
And shrouds to make ready for some.

They have gathered about you the harvest
Of death, in its ghastliest view;
The nearest as well as the farthest

Is here with the traitor and true!
And crowned with your beautiful patience,
Made sunny with love at the heart,
You must balsam the wounds of a nation,
Nor falter, nor shrink from your part!

Up and down through the wards, where the fever
Stalks noisome, and gaunt and impure,
You must go with your steadfast endeavor

To comfort, to counsel, to cure!

I grant that the task's superhuman,

But strength will be given to you

To do for those dear ones what woman
Alone in her pity can do.

'And the lips of the mothers will bless you
As angels sweet visaged and pale!

And the little ones run to caress you,

While the wives and the sisters cry "Hail!"

But e'en if you drop down unheeded,

What matter? God's ways are the best; You've poured out your life where 'twas needed, And He will take care of the rest.

ANONYMOUS (Southern).

A WOMAN OF THE WAR.

[The story told in this poem is literally true. Its heroine, Margaret Augusta Peterson, lived at Rochester, N. Y.; and when, after the battles of the Wilderness, the hospitals of that city were filled with wounded men, she offered her services, and was accepted, as a nurse, at St. Mary's Hospital. She died September 1, 1864, at the age of twenty-three; and her grave and the surgeon's may be seen in Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester.]

THROUGH the sombre arch of that gateway tower
Where my humblest townsman rides at last,
You may spy the bells of a nodding flower,
On a double mound that is thickly grassed.

And between the spring and the summer time,
Or ever the lilac's bloom is shed,

When they come with banners and wreaths and rhyme,

To deck the tombs of the nation's dead,

They find there a little flag in the grass,
And fling a handful of roses down,

And pause a moment before they pass

To the Captain's grave with the gilded crown.

But if perchance they seek to recall

What name, what deeds, these honors declare,

They cannot tell, they are silent all

As the noiseless harebell nodding there.

She was tall, with an almost manly grace,

And young, with strange wisdom for one so

young,

And fair with more than a woman's face;

With dark, deep eyes, and a mirthful tongue.

The poor and the fatherless knew her smile;
The friend in sorrow had seen her tears;
She had studied the ways of the rough world's
guile,

And read the romance of historic years.

What she might have been in these times of ours,
At once it is easy and hard to guess;
For always a riddle are half-used powers,
And always a power is lovingness.

But her fortunes fell upon evil days—

If days are evil when evil dies,

And she was not one who could stand at gaze
Where the hopes of humanity fall and rise.

Nor could she dance to the viol's tune

When the drum was throbbing throughout the

land,

Or dream in the light of the summer moon

When Treason was clenching his mailéd hand.

Through the long gray hospital's corridor
She journeyed many a mournful league,
And her light foot fell on the oaken floor
As if it never could know fatigue.

She stood by the good old surgeon's side,

And the sufferers smiled as they saw her stand;
She wrote, and the mothers marvelled and cried
At their darling soldiers' feminine hand.

She was last in the ward when the lights burned low,
And Sleep called a truce to his foeman Pain;
At the midnight cry she was first to go,

To bind up the bleeding wound again.

For sometimes the wreck of a man would rise,
Weird and gaunt in the watch-lamp's gleam,
And tear away bandage and splints and ties,
Fighting the battle all o'er in his dream.

No wonder the youngest surgeon felt

A charm in the presence of that brave soul, Through weary weeks, as she nightly knelt

With the letter from home or the doctor's dole.

He heard her called, and he heard her blessed,
With many a patriot's parting breath;
And ere his soul to itself confessed,

Love leaped to life in those vigils of death.

"O, fly to your home!" came a whisper dread,
"For now the pestilence walks by night."
"The greater the need of me here," she said,
And bared her arm for the lancet's bite.

Was there death, green death, in the atmosphere?
Was the bright steel poisoned? Who can tell!
Her weeping friends gathered beside her bier,
And the clergyman told them all was well.

Well-alas that it should be so!

When a nation's debt reaches reckoning-day— Well for it to be able, but woe

To the generation that's called to pay!

Down from the long gray hospital came

Every boy in blue who could walk the floor;

The sick and the wounded, the blind and the lame, Formed two long files from her father's door.

There was grief in many a manly breast,
While men's tears fell as the coffin passed;
And thus she went to the world of rest,
Martial and maidenly up to the last.

And that youngest surgeon, was he to blame?—
He held the lancet-Heaven only knows.

No matter; his heart broke all the same,
And he laid him down, and never arose.

So Death received, in his greedy hand,
Two precious coins of the awful price
That purchased freedom for this dear land-

For master and bondman-yea, bought it twice,

Such fates too often such women are for!
God grant the Republic a large increase,
To match the heroes in time of war,
And mother the children in time of peace.
ROSSITER JOHNSON.

THE LAST REGIMENT.

["In a pretty little village in Louisiana, destroyed by shells toward the end of the war, on a bayou back from the river, a great number of very old men had been left by their sons and grandsons, while they went to the war. And these old men, many of them veterans of other wars, formed themselves into a regiment, made for themselves uniforms, picked up old flint-lock guns, even mounted a rusty old cannon, and so prepared to go to battle if ever the war came within their reach. Toward the close of the war, some gunboats came down the river, shelling the shore. The old men heard the firing, and, gathering together, they set out with their old muskets and rusty old cannon to try to reach the river over the corduroy road through the cypress swamp. They marched out right merrily that hot day, shouting and bantering to encourage each other, the dim fires of their old eyes burning with desire of battle, although not one of them was young enough or strong enough to stand erect. And they never came back any more. shells from the gunboats set the dense and sultry woods on fire. The old men were shut in by the flames-the gray beards and the gray moss and the gray smoke together."]

The

THE dying land cried; they heard her death call; These bent, bearded men stopped, listened in

tent;

Then rusty old muskets rushed down from the wall,
And squirrel-guns gleamed in that regiment,
And grandsires marched, old muskets in hand,
The last men left in the whole Southland.

The gray grandsires! They were seen to reel,
Their rusty old muskets a wearisome load: