As we passed out into the street, another beautiful morning was dawning.  Upon entering Ward No. 9, we found most of the patients asleep.  But in one corner, between two windows which let in the fast-increasing light, lay an elderly man, calmly breathing his life away.  The morning breeze stirred the thin gray hair upon his hollow temples, rustling the leaves of the Bible which lay upon his pillow.  Stooping over him to feel the fluttering pulse, and to wipe the clammy sweat from brow and hands, I saw that he was indeed dying, a victim of that dreadful scourge that decimated the ranks of the Confederate armies more surely than many battles,—­dysentery,—­which, if not cured in the earlier stages, resulted too surely, as now, in consumption of the bowels.

He was a Kentuckian, cut off from home and friends, and dying among strangers.  An almost imperceptible glance indicated that he wished me to take up his Bible.  The fast-stiffening lips whispered, “Read.”  I read to him the Fourteenth Chapter of St. John, stopping frequently to note if the faint breathing yet continued.  Each time he would move the cold fingers in a way that evidently meant “go on.”  After I had finished the reading, he whispered, so faintly that I could just catch the words, “Rock of Ages,” and I softly sang the beautiful hymn.

Two years before I could not have done this so calmly.  At first every death among my patients seemed to me like a personal bereavement.  Trying to read or to sing by the bedsides of the dying, uncontrollable tears and sobs would choke my voice.  As I looked my last upon dead faces, I would turn away shuddering and sobbing, for a time unfit for duty. Now, my voice did not once fail or falter.  Calmly I watched the dying patient, and saw (as I had seen a hundred times before) the gray shadow of death steal over the shrunken face, to be replaced at the last by a light so beautiful that I could well believe it came shining through “the gates ajar.”

It was sunrise when I again emerged from Ward No. 9.  Hastening to my room, I quickly bathed and redressed, returning to my office in half an hour, refreshed and ready for duty.

The necessity for breakfast sufficient to feed the hungry patients recalled to me the improvidence of my action in giving away so much bread the night before.  It had gone a very little way toward supplying the needs of so large a body of soldiers, and now my own needed it.

There was no quartermaster, no one to issue fresh rations.  Again I had the cows milked, gathered up all the corn-bread that was left, with some hard-tack, and with the aid of the few decrepit nurses before mentioned made a fire, and warmed up the soup and soup-meat which had been prepared for the convalescent table the day before, but was not consumed.  My patients, comprehending the situation, made the best of it.  But the distribution was a tedious business, as many of the patients had to be fed by myself.