“I KNEW YOU WOULD COME”
[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 22, pages 58-59.]
Col. W. R. Aylett tells the following tender story:
Once during the war, when the lines of the enemy 132 separated me from my home, I was an inmate of my brother’s Richmond home while suffering from a wound. As soon as I could walk about a little, my first steps were directed to Seabrook’s Hospital to see some of my dear comrades who were worse wounded than I. While sitting by the cot of a friend, who was soon to “pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” I witnessed a scene that I can hardly ever think of without quickened pulse and moist eye.
A beautiful boy, too young to fight and die, and a member of an Alabama regiment, was dying from a terrible wound a few feet off. His mother had been telegraphed for at his request. In the wild delirium of his dying moments he had been steadily calling for her, “Oh, mother, come; do come quickly!” Then, under the influence of opiates given to smooth his entrance into eternal rest, he dozed and slumbered. The thunders of the great guns along the lines of the immortal Lee roused him up. Just then his dying eyes rested upon one of the lovely matrons of Richmond advancing toward him. His reeling brain and distempered imagination mistook her for his mother. Raising himself up, with a wild, delirious cry of joy, which rang throughout the hospital, he cried: “Oh, mother! I knew you would come! I knew you would come! I can die easy now;” and she, humoring his illusion, let him fall upon her bosom, and he died happy in her arms, her tears flowing for him as if he had been her own son.