Chapter XIV. In the Hospital

As the tall ship whose lofty prore Shall never stem the billows more Deserted by her gallant band, Amid the breakers lies astrand-- Soon his couch lay Rhoderick Dhu, And oft his fevered limbs he threw In toss abrupt, as when her sides Lie rocking in the advancing tides, That shake her frame with ceaseless beat, Yet can not heave her from her seat;-- O, how unlike her course on sea! Or his free step on hill and lea!--Lady of the Lake.

An Army Hospital is the vestibule of the Cemetery--the ante-room where the recruiting-agents of Death--Wounds and Disease--assemble their conscripts to prepare them for the ranks from which there is neither desertion nor discharge. Therein enter those who are to lay aside "this muddy vesture of decay," for the changeless garb of the Beyond. Thither troop the Wasted and Stricken to rest a little, and prepare for the last great journey, the first milestone of which is placed over their heads.

Humanity and Science have done much for the Army Hospital, but still its swinging doors wave two to the tomb where they return one to health and activity.

It was a broiling hot day when Rachel Bond descended from the ambulance which had brought her from the station to camp.

She shielded her eyes with a plam-leaf fan, and surveyed the surroundings of the post of duty to which she had been assigned. She found herself in a little city of rough plank barracks, arranged in geometrically correct streets and angles about a great plain of a parade ground, from which the heat radiated as from a glowing stove. A flag drooped as if wilted from the top of a tall pole standing on the side of the parade-ground opposite her. Languidly pacing in front of the Colonel's tent was an Orderly, who had been selected in the morning for his spruce neatness, but who now looked like some enormous blue vegetable, rapidly withering under the sun's blistering rays.

Beyond were the barracks, baking and sweltering, cracking their rough, unpainted sides into yawning fissures, and filling the smothering air with resinous odors distilled from the fat knots in the refuse planking of which they were built. Beyond these was the line of camp-guards--bright gun-barrels and bayonets glistening painfully, and those who bore them walking with as weary slowness as was consistent with any motion whatever, along their beats.

On straw in the oven-like barracks, and under the few trees in the camp-ground, lay the flushed and panting soldiers, waiting wearily for that relief which the descending sun would bring.

The hospital to which Rachel had been brought differed from the rest of the sheds in the camp by being whitewashed within and without, which made it radiate a still more unendurable heat than its duller-lustered companions. A powerful odor of chloride of lime and carbolic acid shocked her sensitive nostrils with their tales of all the repulsiveness those disinfectants were intended