And now we desire to say a few words relative to the work you have just completed reading.  It may appear to you a wild and extravagant tale of hardships and privations which existed only in the imagination of the author.  Were your supposition correct, we should rejoice, but unfortunately, every day brings us scenes of poverty that this work lacks in ability to portray, in sufficient force, the terrible sufferings borne by thousands of our people.  In the plenitude of our wealth, we think not of poor, and thus we cannot tell or find out the hundreds of poverty stricken wretches who cover the country.  Our natures may be charitable even, but we only give charity where it is asked for, and await the coming of the mendicant before our purses are opened.  By these means alone do we judge the extent of suffering in the land, and, not hearing of many cases of penury, or receiving many applications for assistance, we believe that the assertions of great want being among the people are untrue, and we purposely avoid searching for the truth of such assertions.  The design of the author, in this little book, has been to open the eyes of the people to the truth.  If he has painted the trials of the soldiers wife more highly colored than reality could permit, it has been because he desired to present his argument with greater force than he could otherwise have done; and yet, if we examine well the picture he presents; take it in its every part, and look on each one, we will find that it does not exaggerate a single woe.  We have seen far greater scenes of wretchedness than those narrated herein; scenes which defy description; for their character has been so horrible that to depict it, a pen mightier than a Bulwer’s or a Scott’s would be necessary.

The tale which the reader has just finished perusing is taken from scenes that actually occurred during the present war—­except, perhaps, that part which relates the tearing of the mother from the bedside of her dead child.  In every other respect all that is narrated in the foregoing pages are strictly true, and there are parties now in the South, who, when they read this work, will recognize in themselves, some of the characters represented herein.  The Author would rejoice, for the sake of humanity and civilization if the tale he has written was only a fiction of his own imagining; but did it not contain truths the work would never have been written.  No other object than that of calling attention to the vast misery and wretchedness which at the present time of writing abounds in the South, prompted the Author to pen the pages which you have perused.  He has witnessed them himself; he has seen the soldiers wife absolutely starving, and from a slender purse has himself endeavored to relieve their necessities.  To present before the world the fact that there are thousands in our midst who are in absolute beggary, has been the object of the writer, and to call on those who are able to do so, to aid these