I have, sitting by the bedside of sick or wounded soldiers, read to them letters from just such homes, breathing lofty courage, full of cheer, although I knew that the hearts of the writers had been almost breaking, the fingers that penned them stiff and trembling with toil hitherto unknown.  God bless the women of the South.

If from every wreath that ever adorned the brow of a hero the brightest laurels were plucked, all would not form an offering too resplendent to lay at their feet.

Soon after the battle of Shiloh began my service with the Army of Tennessee.  How shall I make you understand, dear friends, how strong, how dear, how imperishable are the ties which bind me to these grand and noble heroes,—­the true, brave boys with whom I shared until the bitter end their trials and glory.  Heroic souls who bore with equal fortitude and transcendent bravery alike the shock of battle, the pangs of “hope deferred,” the untold hardships which soon became their daily portion.  Their bleeding feet dyed alike the snows of Georgia and the rocky mountain paths of Tennessee.

As their ranks were decimated by battle, disease, starvation, death, the hearts that were left swelled higher and higher with holy zeal, sublime courage.  Night after night, with lagging, unwilling feet, they made the hated retreat.

Day after day the sun shone on those defiant faces as they presented a still unbroken front and hurled themselves again and again against the invaders, contesting every inch of the land they loved.

Ah, the horrors of those latter days, when daily, almost hourly, brought to me ghastly wrecks of manhood, when my ears were always filled with the moans of the dying, or irrepressible agonizing shrieks of those who were undergoing the torture of the surgeon’s knife without the blessed aid of chloroform, for that was contraband of war.  Do you wonder, then, that I love to call those comrades of mine “my boys”?  Whether they served in the Army of Northern Virginia or the Army of Tennessee, they were all alike my comrades.  Their precious blood has often dyed my own garments.  I have gone down with them to the very gates of death, wrestling with the death angel every step of the way, sometimes only to receive their last sighs as they passed into the valley of the shadow, sometimes permitted to guide their feeble feet once more into the paths of glory.

I have shared their rations, plain but plentiful at first, at the last only a mouldy crust and a bit of rusty bacon.  I have been upon an ambulance-train freighted with human agony delayed for hours by rumors of an enemy in ambush.  I have fed men hungry with the ravening hunger of the wounded with scanty rations of musty corn-bread; have seen them drink eagerly of foetid water, dipped from the road-side ditches.  Yet they bore it all with supreme patience; fretted and chafed, it is true, but only on account of enforced inactivity.  I have packed haversacks with marching