nor miscreants, but plain, honest men on a proper errand.  The first of them I will pass over briefly.  He was a young man, of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment, which he was going to rejoin.  He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had the misfortune to know little more than what I had learned from Southey’s “Life of Wesley,” and from the exquisite hymns we have borrowed from its rhapsodists.  The other stranger was a New-Englander of respectable appearance, with a grave, hard, honest, hay-bearded face, who had come to serve the sick and wounded on the battle-field and in its immediate neighborhood.  There is no reason why I should not mention his name, but I shall content myself with calling him the Philanthropist.

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James Grayden their driver, the gentle lady, whose serene patience bore up through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist, and myself, the teller of this story.

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the trail from the great battle-field.  The road was filled with straggling and wounded soldiers.  All who could travel on foot—­multitudes with slight wounds of the upper limbs, the head or face—­were told to take up their beds—­a light burden, or none at all—­and walk.  Just as the battle-field sucks everything into its red vortex for the conflict, so does it drive everything off in long, diverging rays after the fierce centripetal forces have met and neutralized each other.  For more than a week there had been sharp fighting all along this road.  Through the streets of Frederick, through Crampton’s Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the Antietam, the long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their path through our fields and villages.  The slain of higher condition, “embalmed” and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank-and-file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as I have said, at every step in the road.  It was a pitiable sight, truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more than the sight of this great caravan of maimed pilgrims.  The companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of their suffering; it was next to impossible to individualize it, and so bring it home as one can do with a single broken limb or aching wound.  Then they were all of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime of their strength.  Though they tramped so wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing in store for them.  These wounds they bore would be the medals they would show their children and grandchildren by-and-by.  Who would not rather wear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?