MY DEAR NED,――For though I have never yet had the pleasure of seeing you at our house, I still feel as though I knew you, Tom has said so much to me of you, and has shown so much more than he has said. I have felt very thankful that you were his friend; and now that this terrible and dreadful parting is to separate me from my only child, I am glad that you are to be with him. I know the cause that calls him, and I feel that it is better for him to go than to stay; but, though I say yes, I say it with an agony beyond your comprehension. I want your promise that you will not leave Tom during the time that your country may need you; that you will suffer nothing but death to separate you; that you will refuse promotion and honor, if it is to part you from him; that you will stay by his side in the progress of the battles that may come. It is through your influence that he goes; I must look to you for his safety. So make me this promise; and, in return, what can I give? what can I say? This only: that my house shall be your home; and that I shall feel as if I had two sons instead of one.
“A great hot plain from sea to mountain spread; Through it a level river slowly drawn: He moved with a vast crowd, and at its head Streamed banners like the dawn.”
A bare room, the dead whiteness of whose plastered wall is only relieved by a coarsely colored print of the Virgin Mary in blue and scarlet, which hangs in a dingy gilt frame on the wall at the head of the bed. A crack in the glass has relieved the features of the Virgin of their ordinary expression of insipidity, but has substituted therefor a look of malevolence quite unpleasant to see. Fortunately for the man who lies, heavily sleeping, upon the pallet bed, this picture is not where his eyes can rest upon it. Beside the bed are two little stools, which constitute all the furniture of the room, and, indeed, all that it is well capable of containing; for so cramped and narrow are its dimensions, that it seems to be scarcely more than a closet with a window in it. Through the half-open door-way, however, can be seen long lines of beds, with the quiet figures of nurses and physicians passing back and forth through the ward.
Two people entered carefully and noiselessly through the open door-way,――one evidently an army physician; the other, in a captain’s uniform now, was Tom, bronzed and sunburnt, but the same careless, light-hearted boy as when he left Cambridge one year before. There was a look of anxiety on his face now, however, as he bent over the sleeping figure and asked:――