Sitting, sewing there, when that July night came, she had no prescience that her trial day was at hand: for to stoop-shouldered women over machines, as well as to Job, a trial day does come, when Satan obtains leave in heaven to work his will on them, straining the fibre they are made of, that God may see what work they are fit for in the lives to come. This was the way it came to the girl. That morning, when she was stretching out some muslin to bleach in a light summer shower, there was a skirmish down yonder in among some of the low coal-hills along the Shenandoah, and half a dozen men were brought wounded in to Harper's Ferry. There was no hospital there then; one of the half-burnt Government offices was used for the purpose; and as the surgeon at that post, Dr. Blecker, was one of the wounded, young Dr. Nott came over from the next camp to see to them. His first cases: he had opened an office only for six months, out in Portage, Ohio, before he got into the army; in those six months he played chess principally, and did the poetry for the weekly paper,--his tastes being innocent: the war has been a grand outlet into a career for doctors and chaplains of that calibre. Dr. Nott, coming into the low arsenal-room that night, stopped to brush the clay off his trousers before going his rounds, and to whisk the attar of rose from his handkerchief. "No fever? All wounds?" of the orderly who carried the flaring tallow candle.
All wounds: few of them, but those desperate. Even the vapid eyes of Nott grew grave before he was through, and he ceased tipping on his toes, and tittering: he was a good-hearted fellow, at bottom, growing silent altogether when he came to operate on the surgeon, who had waited until the last. "The ball is out, Dr. Blecker,"--looking up at length, but not meeting the wounded man's eye.
"I know. Cross the bandage now. You'll send a despatch for me, Nott? There is some one I want to see, before----I'll hold out two or three days?"
"Pooh, pooh! Not so bad as that. We'll hope at least, Dr. Blecker, not so bad as that. I've paper and pencil here." So Dr. Blecker sent the despatch.
It was a hot July night, soon after the seven days' slaughter at Richmond. You remember how the air for weeks after that lay torpid with a suppressed heat,--as though the very earth held her breath to hear the sharp tidings of death. It never was fully told aloud,--whispered only,--and even that hoarse whisper soon died out. We were growing used to the taste of blood by that time, in North and South, like bulls in a Spanish arena. This night, and in one or two following it, the ashy sultriness overhead was hint of some latent storm. It is one of the vats of the world where storms are brewed,--Harper's Ferry: stagnant mountain-air shut in by circling peaks whose edges cut into the sky; the sun looking straight down with a torrid compelling eye into the water all the day long, until at evening it goes wearily up to him in a pale sigh of mist, lingering to rest and say good-bye among the wooded sides of the hills. Our hill-storms are generally bred there: it was not without a certain meaning that the political cloud took its rise in this town, whose thunder has shaken the continent with its bruit.