Oh! that I now lay on your pillowing breast,
To breathe my last sigh on the bosom first pressed.”
But in the stillness of the night, with no dear mother there, he passed away. Here is another, a young man from my own county, over whom for many weeks I had anxiously watched; his aged father is sent for; the poor boy still lingers day after day and week after week, but at length he yields up his young life to the “King of Terrors,” and the gray-headed sire is bereft of the staff of his declining years. Here again are two, lying side by side in the same hospital; one lingers long with typhoid pneumonia, the other is an intense sufferer with rheumatic fever, who goes only two days before his comrade. In the same ward is another—a Massachusetts soldier—to whom it was my privilege frequently to take some little delicacy. He is recovering from a long run of fever; is able to be about the ward, with a fair prospect of going home soon on furlough, when he is suddenly seized with that disease of all others the most dreaded—small-pox; he is removed to the “Pest House,” and we see him no more. Here is still another, wounded in the head; he has become a raving maniac, and is carried off to the Insane Asylum. There are others, many others, but the catalogue would be too long to mention them all, yet such will ever be held in sacred remembrance.
Oh! sad memories of the past, how deeply are ye stirred!
The dying soldier haunts me still!
Dying ’mong strangers—dying at night,
Far from his home and his kindred so dear,
Far from the loved ones he left for the fight,
When he bade them farewell, with a kiss and a tear.