(M.) We have on two of our boats nine contraband women, from the Lee estate,—real Virginia "darkies," and excellent workers,—who all "wish on their souls and bodies" that the Rebels could be "put in a house together and burned up." "Mary Susan," the blackest of them, yielded at once to the allurements of freedom and fashion, and begged Mr. K. to take a little commission for her the next time he went to Washington. "I wants you for to get me, sar, if you please, a lawn dress and hoop-skirt, sar." The women not working on our boats do the hospital washing for us in their cabins on the Lee estate, and I have been up to-day to hurry them with the Knickerbocker's eleven hundred pieces. The negro quarters are decent and comfortable little houses, with a wide road between them and the bank which slopes to the river. Any number of little darkey babies are rushing about, and tipping into the wash-tubs, and in one cottage we found two absurdly small babies taken care of by an antique bronze, calling itself grandmother. Babies had the measles, which wouldn't "come out" on one of them. So she had laid him tenderly in the open clay oven, and, with hot sage-tea and an unusually large brick put to his morsels of feet, was proceeding to develop the disease. Two of the colored women and their husbands work for us at the tent kitchen, close by the shore, and entertain us by their singing. The other night Molly and Nellie collected all their friends behind their tent and commenced, in a sort of monotonous recitativo, a condensed narrative of the creation of the world; one giving out a line and all the others joining in. They went straight through from Genesis to Revelation, following with a confession of sin and exhortation to do better,—till suddenly their deep humility seemed to strike them as uncalled for, and they rose at once into the "assurance of the saints," and each one instructed her neighbor at the top of her voice to
"Go tell all the holy angels,
I done, done all I ever can."
Just as they came to a pause the train arrived; midnight, as usual, and the work of feeding and caring for the sick began again. Dr. Ware was busy with his nightly work of seeing that the men were properly lifted from the platform cars and put into the Sibley tents; H. was "processing" his detail with additional blankets and quilts; and Wagner, our Zouave, and his five men, were going the rounds with hot tea and fresh bread, while we were getting ready beef-tea and punch for the use of the sickest through the night. By two o'clock we could cross the gang-plank to the Small again, feeling that all the men were quiet and comfortable.
We women constantly receive noble and patriotic letters from the parents and friends of the soldiers who have died here among us, one of our duties being to write to the families of those we have had care of. Mrs. —— had sent her the other day, from one of the —— Regiment, a little poem in such delicate acknowledgment of kindness received that I must copy it:—
"From old St. Paul till now,
Of honorable women not a few
Have left their golden ease in love to do
The saintly work that Christlike hearts pursue.