G. is really up and about, looking thin and white, and feeling hungry and weak; but little H. has been sick with the same disease these ten days past.  I got your letter and the little cat, for which G. and I thank you very much.  I should think it would about kill you to cook all day even for our soldiers, but on the whole can not blame any one who wants to get killed in their service.  I am impressed more and more with their claims upon us, who confront every danger and undergo every suffering, while we sit at home at our ease.  However, the ease I have enjoyed during the last five weeks has not been of a very luxurious kind, and I have felt almost discouraged, as day after day of confinement and night after night of sleeplessness has pulled down my strength.  But, what am I doing?  Complaining, instead of rejoicing that I am not left unchastised.

After a careworn summer at Newport, she went with the children to Williamstown, where a month was passed with her brother-in-law, Professor Hopkins.  The following letters relate to this visit: 

To her Husband, Williamstown, Sept. 19, 1862.

I am glad to find that you place reliance on the reports of our late victory, for I have been in great suspense, seeing only The World, which was throwing up its hat and declaring the war virtually ended.  I have no faith in such premature assertions, of which we have had so many, but was most anxious to know your opinion.  Do not fail to keep me informed of what is going on.  The children are all out of doors and enjoying themselves.  The Professor has gone on horseback to see about his buckwheat.  He took me up there yesterday afternoon, and I crawled through forty fences (more or less) and got a vast amount of exercise, which did not result in any better sleep, however, than no exercise does.  Caro.  H. read me yesterday a most interesting letter from her brother Henry, describing the scene at Bull Run when he went there five days after the battle.  It is very painful to find such mismanagement as he deplores.  He gave a most touching account of a young fellow who lay mortally wounded, where he had lain uncared-for with his companions the five days, and whom they were obliged to decline removing, as they had only room for a portion of the hopeful cases.  After beseeching Mr. H. to see that he was removed, and entreating to know when and how he was ever to get home if they left him, he was told that it was not possible to make room for him in this train of ambulances.  As Mr. H. tore himself away, he heard him say,

  “Here, Lord, I give myself away;
  ’Tis all that I can do.”

The torture of the wounded men in the ambulances was so frightful, that Mr. H. gave each of them morphine enough to kill three well men.  They “cried for it like dogs and licked my hands lest they should lose a drop,” he adds.  As a contrast to this letter, some of the new recruits came into the Professor’s grounds yesterday to get bouquets, and thought if their folks had a “yard” so gayly decked with flowers they would feel set up.