Just so let the summons be given;
A quiver—a pause of the heart—
A vision of angels—then Heaven!
[ "THE 'MOTHER' OF 'ST. ELMO'" ]
AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON
Let me introduce to you Augusta Evans Wilson as I first met her when she was a bride, when her soul, like mine, was allied to love, faith and romance, when every day was made perfect with its own contentment and to-morrow's hope, when we were happy because we loved and were loved.
I do not know why, when she clasped my hand and said, "How young you are," I thought of the poem of Lucas, "The land where we lay dreaming," or why those lines should come back to me now when her feet are treading the path where silence is. It may have been because of her sweet voice, "Which did thrill until at eve the whip-poor-will and at noon the mocking-birds were mute and still," or because of the exchange of memories of those days of shot and shell and red meteors, of the camp, of the march, of the sick and wounded to whom she ministered, and of the realization that "All our glorious visions fled and left us nothing real but the dead, in the land where we lay dreaming."
When she remarked upon my youth the fancy drifted through my mind that she was rather old for a bride, or at least looked so, for I was accustomed to seeing very youthful brides, being only half her years when I was one, while she had passed through ageing experiences, had written many books, and looked older than she really was. I had not formed the habit of thinking of her as Mrs. Wilson, and in the confusion of the old name and the new could not recall either, so called her "Mrs. Macaria." She laughed and told me that she was accustomed to being called "Beulah," but this was the first time that she had been addressed as "Mrs. Macaria."
She told me of the many adventures of "Macaria" in its early days. Camp "Beulah," named in honor of her second book, which appeared not long before the opening of the war and brought her at once into prominence as a writer, was near Summerville, the girlhood home of Augusta Evans, and in that camp and its hospital, as well as in the many others which soon sprang up around the Evans residence, she took a Southern woman's share in the work, the darkness and the heartache of the time. Her friend, Mr. Thomas Cooper De Leon, of Mobile, gives a picture of her in those days:
The slim, willowy girl, with masses of brown hair coiled in the funnel depths of a poke bonnet, a long check apron and a pair of tin buckets, became the typical guardian angel of the nearby hospitals.