WE WANT TO DIE AT HOME.
The room may be very humble, and the faces that look into ours may be very plain; but who cares for that? Loving hands to bathe the temples; loving voices to speak good cheer; loving lips to read the comforting promises of Jesus. In the war men cast the cannon; men fashioned the musketry; men cried to the hosts, "Forward, march!" men hurled their battalions on the sharp edges of the enemy, crying, "Charge! charge!" but woman scraped the lint; woman administered the cordials; woman watched by the dying couch; woman wrote the last message to the home circle; woman wept at the solitary burial, attended by herself and four men with a spade. We greeted the generals home with brass bands and triumphal arches and wild huzzas; but the story is too good to be written anywhere, save in
THE CHRONICLES OF HEAVEN,
of Mrs. Brady, who came down among the sick in the swamps of the Chickahominy; of Annie Ross in the cooper-shop hospital; of Margaret Breckinridge, who came to men who had been for weeks with their wounds undressed, some of them frozen to the ground, and when she turned them over, those who had an arm left waved it, and filled the air with their "hurrah!"—of Mrs. Hodge, who came from Chicago with blankets and with pillows, until the men shouted: "Three cheers for the Christian-Commission! God bless the women at home!" then sitting down to take the last message: "Tell my wife not to fret about me, but to meet me in heaven; tell her to train up the boys whom we have loved so well; tell her we shall meet again in the good land; tell her to bear my loss like the Christian wife of a Christian soldier"—and of Mrs. Shelton, into whose face the convalescent soldier looked and said: "Your grapes and cologne cured me."
Men did their work with shot, and shell, and carbine, and howitzer;
WOMEN DID THEIR WORK
with socks, and slippers, and bandages, and warm drinks, and Scripture texts, and gentle strokings of the hot temples, and stories of that land where they never have any pain. Men knelt down over the wounded and said: "On which side did you fight?" Women knelt down over the wounded and said: "Where are you hurt? What nice thing can I make for you to eat? What makes you cry?" To-night, while we men are sound asleep in our beds, there will be a light in yonder loft; there will be groaning down that dark alley; there will be cries of distress in that cellar. Men will sleep, and women will watch.
II. Again, woman has a superlative right to take
CARE OF THE POOR.
There are hundreds and thousands of them in all our cities. There is a kind of work that men cannot do for the poor. Here comes a group of little barefoot children to the door of the Dorcas Society. They need to be clothed and provided for. Which of these directors of banks would know how many yards it would take to make that little girl a dress? Which of these masculine hands could fit a hat to that little girl's head? Which of the wise men would know how to tie on that new pair of shoes? Man sometimes gives his charity in a rough way, and it falls like the fruit of a tree in the East, which fruit comes down so heavily that it breaks the skull of the man who is trying to gather it. But woman glides so softly into the house of destitution, and finds out all the sorrows of the place, and puts so quietly the donation on the table, that all the family come out on the front steps as she departs, expecting that from under her shawl she will thrust out two wings and go right up toward heaven, from whence she seems to have come down.