It was a great trial of her Christian patience to see families of children of all ages, dirty, ragged, and ill-mannered, lounging in the halls and at the front door, and their mothers doing little better themselves, getting into disputes with each other, or hovering round a stove, chewing or smoking tobacco, and leaving the necessary work allotted to them neglected and undone. But out of this material and this confusion Miss Elliott, by her efficiency and force of character, brought a good degree of cleanliness and order. Among other things she established a school in the Home, gathered the children into it in the evening, taught them to spell, read and sing, and inspired them with a desire for knowledge.
At the end of a year of this kind of work Miss Elliott was called to the position of matron of the Soldiers' Orphans' Home, at Farmington, Iowa, which she accepted and filled for several months, with her usual efficiency and success, when, after long and arduous service for the soldiers, for the refugees and for the orphans of our country's defenders, she returned to the home of her family, and to the society and occupations for which she was preparing herself before the war.
MARY DWIGHT PETTES.
o one who was accustomed to visit the military hospitals of St. Louis, during the first years of the war, the meeting with Mary Dwight Pettes in her ministry to the sick and wounded soldiers must always return as a pleasant and sacred memory. And such an one will not fail to recall how she carried to the men pleasant reading, how she sat by their bed-sides speaking words of cheer and sympathy, and singing songs of country, home, and heaven, with a voice of angelic sweetness. Nor, how after having by her own exertions procured melodeons for the hospital chapels, she would play for the soldiers in their Sabbath worship, and bring her friends to make a choir to assist in their religious services.
Slender in form, her countenance radiant with intelligence, and her dark eyes beaming with sympathy and kindness, it was indeed a pleasant surprise to see one so young and delicate, going about from hospital to hospital to find opportunities of doing good to the wan and suffering, and crippled heroes, who had been brought from hard-fought battle-fields to be cared for at the North.
But no one of the true Sisters of Mercy, who gave themselves to this service during the war, felt more intense and genuine satisfaction in her labors than she, and not one is more worthy of our grateful remembrance, now that she has passed away from the scene of her joys and her labors forever.
Mary Dwight Pettes was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in the year 1841, and belonged to a family who were eminent for their intelligence, and religious and moral worth. The circumstances of her early life and education are unknown to the writer of this sketch, but must have been such as to develop that purity of mind and manners, that sweetness and amiability of temper, that ready sympathy and disinterestedness of purpose and conduct, which, together with rare conversational and musical powers, she possessed in so high a degree.