The men who watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the race.  One of them was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed.  I saw one poor fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing, anxious and restless.  The men were debating about the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I happened there at the right moment to see that he was well narcotized for the night.  Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these places?  Certainly possible, but not probable; but as the lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind of thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated.  Many times as I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I started as some faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man’s hair, the outline of his half-turned face,—­recalled the presence I was in search of.  The face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would pass away, but still the fancy clung to me.  There was no figure huddled up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance, that I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was making my pilgrimage to the battlefield.

“There are two wounded Secesh,” said my companion.  I walked to the bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember right, from North Carolina.  He was of good family, son of a judge in one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle, intelligent.  One moment’s intercourse with such an enemy, lying helpless and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in deadly strife.  The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race in the men of the North and South.  It would be worth a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened with the best blood of the land.  My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of speech.  It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others of like training with his own,—­a man who, but for the curse which our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral standard of a peaceful and united people.