HEADQUARTERS OF THE SANITARY COMMISSION, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC.
(From a war-time photograph.)
MARGARET AUGUSTA PETERSON.

Dr. Bellows, president of the Sanitary Commission, writing of his experiences on the field of Gettysburg, said: "I went out to the field hospital of the Third Corps, where two thousand four hundred men lay in their tents, a vast camp of mutilated humanity. One woman [Miss Gilson], young and fair, but grave and earnest, clothed in purity and mercy—the only woman on that whole vast camp—moved in and out of the hospital tent, speaking some tender word, giving some restoring cordial, holding the hand of a dying boy, or receiving the last words of a husband for his widowed wife. I can never forget how, amid scenes which under ordinary circumstances no woman could have appeared in without gross indecorum, the holy pity and purity of this angel of mercy made her presence seem as fit as though she had indeed dropped out of heaven. The men themselves, sick or well, all seemed awed and purified by such a resident among them." Miss Gilson continued her labors unremittingly through the war, and died about two years after its close, probably from the effects of her arduous work, at the age of thirty-two.

Besides the labors of such women in the field hospitals, a vast amount of similar and quite as useful work was done by a great number of women in the hospitals at various points in the Northern States, whither the wounded were sent as soon as they could be removed. A peculiarly sad and romantic case was that of Margaret Augusta Peterson, a young lady of brilliant promise, who entered upon service in a large hospital at Rochester, N. Y., refused to leave it when there was an outbreak of small-pox, saying she was then needed more than ever, and lost her life, at the age of twenty-three, from some dreadful mistake in the vaccination. Her story, which had other romantic elements, is told literally in this poem:

Through the sombre arch of that gateway tower
Where my humblest townsman rides at last,
You may spy the bells of a nodding flower,
On a double mound that is thickly grassed.

And between the spring and the summer time,
Or ever the lilac's bloom is shed,
When they come with banners and wreaths and rhyme,
To deck the tombs of the nation's dead,

They find there a little flag in the grass,
And fling a handful of roses down,
And pause a moment before they pass
To the captain's grave with the gilded crown.

But if perchance they seek to recall
What name, what deeds, these honors declare,
They cannot tell, they are silent all
As the noiseless harebell nodding there.

She was tall, with an almost manly grace;
And young, with strange wisdom for one so young;
And fair, with more than a woman's face;
With dark, deep eyes, and a mirthful tongue.

The poor and the fatherless knew her smile;
The friend in sorrow had seen her tears;
She had studied the ways of the rough world's guile,
And read the romance of historic years.

What she might have been in these times of ours,
At once it is easy and hard to guess;
For always a riddle are half-used powers,
And always a power is lovingness.

But her fortunes fell upon evil days—
If days are evil when evil dies—
And she was not one who could stand at gaze
Where the hopes of humanity fall and rise.

Nor could she dance to the viol's tune,
When the drum was throbbing throughout the land,
Or dream in the light of the summer moon,
When Treason was clinching his mailèd hand.

Through the long, gray hospital's corridor
She journeyed many a mournful league,
And her light foot fell on the oaken floor
As if it never could know fatigue.

She stood by the good old surgeon's side,
And the sufferers smiled as they saw her stand;
She wrote, and the mothers marvelled and cried
At their darling soldiers' feminine hand.

She was last in the ward when the lights burned low,
And Sleep called a truce to his foeman Pain;
At the midnight cry she was first to go,
To bind up the bleeding wound again.

For sometimes the wreck of a man would rise,
Weird and gaunt in the watch-lamp's gleam,
And tear away bandage and splints and ties,
Fighting the battle all o'er in his dream.

No wonder the youngest surgeon felt
A charm in the presence of that brave soul,
Through weary weeks, as she nightly knelt
With the letter from home or the doctor's dole.

He heard her called, and he heard her blessed,
With many a patriot's parting breath;
And ere his soul to itself confessed,
Love leaped to life in those vigils of death.

"Oh, fly to your home!" came a whisper dread,
"For now the pestilence walks by night."
"The greater the need of me here," she said,
And bared her arm for the lancet's bite.

Was there death, green death, in the atmosphere?
Was the bright steel poisoned? Who call tell?
Her weeping friends gathered beside her bier,
And the clergyman told them all was well.

Well—alas that it should be so!
When a nation's debt reaches reckoning-day—
Well for it to be able, but woe
To the generation that's called to pay!

Down from the long, gray hospital came
Every boy in blue who could walk the floor;
The sick and the wounded, the blind and lame,
Formed two long files from her father's door.

There was grief in many a manly breast,
While men's tears fell as the coffin passed;
And thus she went to the world of rest,
Martial and maidenly up to the last.

And that youngest surgeon, was he to blame?—
He held the lancet—Heaven only knows.
No matter; his heart broke all the same,
And he laid him down, and never arose.

So Death received, in his greedy hand,
Two precious coins of the awful price
That purchased freedom for this dear land—
For master and bondman—yea, bought it twice.

Such fates too often such women are for!
God grant the Republic a large increase,
To match the heroes in time of war,
And mother the children in time of peace.

CHAPTER XXX.

MINOR EVENTS OF THE THIRD YEAR.