"Look at your arm once, Johnny."
What was his glad surprise to find that the operation had been already performed, and that a neat bandage was wound about his shoulder!
The most striking illustration of the power of religion to sustain a man in distress and trial, I saw there in that field-hospital.
We had carried Stannard into a tent, and laid him on a pile of pine-boughs, where, had he only been able to keep quiet, he would have done well enough. But he was not able to keep quiet. A more restless man I never saw. Although his wound was not considered necessarily dangerous, yet he was evidently in great fear of death, and for death, I grieve to say, he was not at all prepared. He had been a wild, wayward man, and now that he thought the end was approaching, he was full of alarm. As I bent over him, trying my best, but in vain, to comfort and quiet him, my attention was called to a man on the other side of the tent, whose face I thought I knew, in spite of its unearthly pallor.
"Why, Smith," said I, "is this you? Where are you hurt?"
"Come turn me around and see," he said.
Rolling him over carefully on his side, I saw a great, cruel wound in his back.
My countenance must have expressed alarm when I asked him, as quietly as I could, whether he knew that he was very seriously wounded, and might die.
Never shall I forget the look that man gave me, as, with a strange light in his eye, he said:
"I am in God's hands; I am not afraid to die."