“‘If you could only read a few verses out of my Bible and pray with me, I should be so glad. I’m going to die, and I a’n’t afraid to go, but I do want somebody to read and pray with me first.’
“Only think of that; for me, who never dared to speak loud in any meeting at home, to be asked to pray with a sick man in a hospital! It was like a blow to me, and for a minute I didn’t know what to say; but there were those eyes looking right through me, and he said softly, ‘If you only could.’ So I plucked up courage, and said, ‘I will,’ and then I shut to the door and read a chapter in a low voice, just so he could hear me, and tried to ask God to help and comfort the poor boy, for he was nothing more. When I got through, he took hold of my hand, and said, ‘I can’t thank you for your kindness as I want to, but God will reward you, I’m sure. Take the blessing of a dying man, and remember you have comforted my last hours.’
“I was ashamed to hear him speak so; for after all, what had I done to deserve thanks for?
“He died the next day, and I staid by him all I could when Willie didn’t need me, and wrote a letter to his mother just as he gave the words to me only an hour or two before he breathed his last. Poor woman! I pitied her, for he was a noble-looking fellow, and one that feared God, and I know a mother must have set a great store by such a son.”
In another letter she wrote,
“My little Willie is getting along very slowly, and the doctors look sober about him, and I know they’re afraid he’s going into a decline. His mother died of that, and they say the shock to his system has been so great that it may not be able to rally again. But he’s just as happy as the day is long, and says if he had twenty arms, he’d be willing to give them all for his country.
“I don’t see much of the captain or Miss Lilian, for he is in another building where the officers are; and he’s so low, they don’t let anybody visit him unless they have a special permit from the doctor. I believe they have a little more hope of him than they had at first, but Miss Lilian says his life hangs by a single thread. Dear Miss Lilian, she looks tired and pale, but her smile is just as bright as ever, and when she comes to see Willie, it always cheers him up, like a breath of fresh air or a bunch of flowers.”
While Miss Letty was away in Hagerstown, a letter came to the Fenton’s from their absent son, who was a prisoner in our lines, and had been severely wounded, bringing the joyful intelligence that he had taken from his heart the oath of allegiance to the dear old flag. As soon as he could travel he would come home for a short visit, and then join the Union army. He told them how he had been left for dead on the field at Williamsburg, and that a little drummer-boy chanced to find him; that he brought him water at the risk of his own life, and finally had him carried from the field by some members of the Twenty-sixth, to which regiment the boy belonged.
While in the hospital there, he said little Willie visited him often at his own special request, and to the artless conversation of this child he attributed his first convictions of the wrong course he had been pursuing. “It was the last thing he thought of,” the letter concluded, “to teach me, whom he regarded as greatly his superior; but his thoughts, so far beyond his years, brought to mind the neglected lessons of my precious mother, and now, if I am like the repenting prodigal, I owe it, under God, to that dear boy, whose heroism is only equalled by the kindness of his heart.”