than has ever been suspected.  All that is necessary to remove floating doubts, to convince all heads of the wisdom which projected this Commission, and to warm all hearts up to its continued and sufficient support, is a knowledge of what it has done, is doing, and purposes to do.  This information the Commission has, at different times, and by piecemeal, furnished:  necessarily by piecemeal, since, as this book justly remarks, the immense mass of details which a circumstantial account of its operations in field and hospital must involve would prove nearly as laborious in the reading as in the performance.  In this little volume we have, photographed, a single phase of its operations.  It consists simply of extracts from letters and reports.  There is no attempt at completeness or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate grouping would probably fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work and its ways as these unpretending fragments.  It delights us to see the—­we can hardly say cheerful, as that savors too much of the “self-sacrifice” which benevolence sometimes tarnishes by talking about—­but, rather, the gay, lively, merry manner in which the most balky matters are taken hold of.  Men and women seem to have gone into the service with good-will and hearty love and buoyant spirits.  It refreshes and strengthens us like a tonic to read of their taking the wounded, festering, filthy, miserable men, washing and dressing them, pouring in lemonade and beef-tea, and putting them abed and asleep.  There is not a word about “devotion” or “ministering angels,” (we could wish there were not quite so much about “ladies,”) but honest, refined, energetic, able women, with quick brains and quick hands, now bathing a poor crazy head with ice-water, to be rewarded with one grateful smile from the parting soul,—­now standing in the way of a procession of the slightly wounded, to pour a little brandy down their throats, or put an orange into their hands, just to keep them up till they reach food and rest,—­now running up the river in a steam-tug, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp as they go,—­now groping their way, at all hours of the night, through torrents of rain, into dreadful places crammed with sick and dying men, “calling back to life those in despair from utter exhaustion, or again and again catching for mother or wife the last faint whispers of the dying,”—­now leaving their compliments to serve a disappointed colonel instead of his dinner, which they had nipped in the bud by dragging away the stove with its four fascinating and not-to-be-withstood pot-holes;—­and let the sutler’s name be wreathed with laurel who not only permitted this, but offered his cart and mule to drag the stove to the boat, and would take no pay!