Chapter 3

CHAPTER III: A DAY.

"They've come! they've come! hurry up, ladies--you're wanted."

"Who have come? the rebels?"

This sudden summons in the gray dawn was somewhat startling to a
three days' nurse like myself, and, as the thundering knock came
at our door, I sprang up in my bed, prepared

"To gird my woman's form,
And on the ramparts die,"

if necessary; but my room-mate took it more coolly, and, as she
began a rapid toilet, answered my bewildered question,--

"Bless you, no child; it's the wounded from Fredericksburg; forty
ambulances are at the door, and we shall have our hands full in
fifteen minutes."

"What shall we have to do?"

"Wash, dress, feed, warm and nurse them for the next three
months, I dare say. Eighty beds are ready, and we were getting
impatient for the men to come. Now you will begin to see hospital
life in earnest, for you won't probably find time to sit down all
day, and may think yourself fortunate if you get to bed by
midnight. Come to me in the ball-room when you are ready; the
worst cases are always carried there, and I shall need your
help."

So saying, the energetic little woman twirled her hair into a
button at the back of her head, in a "cleared for action" sort of
style, and vanished, wrestling her way into a feminine kind of
pea-jacket as she went.

I am free to confess that I had a realizing sense of the fact
that my hospital bed was not a bed of roses just then, or the
prospect before me one of unmingled rapture. My three days'
experiences had begun with a death, and, owing to the defalcation
of another nurse, a somewhat abrupt plunge into the
superintendence of a ward containing forty beds, where I spent my
shining hours washing faces, serving rations, giving medicine,
and sitting in a very hard chair, with pneumonia on one side,
diphtheria on the other, five typhoids on the opposite, and a
dozen dilapidated patriots, hopping, lying, and lounging about,
all staring more or less at the new "nuss," who suffered untold
agonies, but concealed them under as matronly an aspect as a
spinster could assume, and blundered through her trying labors
with a Spartan firmness, which I hope they appreciated, but am
afraid they didn't. Having a taste for "ghastliness," I had
rather longed for the wounded to arrive, for rheumatism wasn't
heroic, neither was liver complaint, or measles; even fever had
lost its charms since "bathing burning brows" had been used up in
romances, real and ideal; but when I peeped into the dusky street
lined with what I at first had innocently called market carts,
now unloading their sad