to him and by relating to him instances of women who only loved more because the object of their affection had been unfortunate.  Among other things, I told him of the noble English girl who wrote to her mangled lover that she still loved and would marry him “if there was enough of his body left to contain his soul.”  Afterward I felt sorry that I had encouraged him to hope, for it was my misfortune to read to him a very cold letter from his lady-love, who declined to marry “a cripple.”  She wanted a husband who could support her, and as some man who lived near was “mighty fond of her company and could give her a good home,” she reckoned she would take his offer under consideration.

For a few days my poor young friend was inconsolable; but one morning I found him singing.  “I’ve been thinking over that matter,” said he, “and I reckon I’ve had a lucky escape.  That trifling girl would never have made me a good, faithful wife.”  From that day he seemed to have recovered his cheerfulness.  I have never forgiven that faithless girl.

All over the South, wherever “pain and anguish wrung the brow” of their defenders, women became “ministering angels.”

Even those who had been bereft of their own suppressed their tears, stifled the cry of bleeding hearts, and, by unwearied attention to living sufferers, strove to honor their dead.  Self-abnegation was, during the war, a word of meaning intense and real.  Its spirit had its dwelling-place in the souls of faithful women, looked out from the bright eyes of young girls, whose tender feet were newly set in a thorny pathway, as well as from the pale, stricken faces of those whose hearts the thorn had pierced.

Among the tender and true women with whom I have corresponded since the war is the mother of Colonel Robadeaux Wheat, the noble Louisianian who fell at Gaines’s Mill.  I have several of her letters by me, written in the tremulous hand of one who had passed her seventy-ninth birthday, but glowing with love for the cause, and fondest pride in the sons who died in its defence.  It is touching to see how she clings to and cherishes the record, given by his companions in arms, of “Robadeux’s” last hours on earth, when, in the early morning, before going forth to battle, his heart seemed to return to the simple faith of his boyhood, and, gathering his subordinate officers around him in his tent; he read reverently the service of prayer which committed himself and them to the protection of the God of battles.  Mrs. Wheat’s letters are, I think, among the most beautiful and touching I ever read, yet sprightly and interesting.  Believing that all my readers will feel an interest in the mother of glorious “Bob Wheat,” I will here transcribe a small portion.  In one letter she says,—­

  “I am, thank God, in excellent health for one aged seventy-eight. 
  My husband was born in this city (Washington, D.C.) in the year
  one, he says.