L. P. Brockett, Women's work in the civil war: a record of heroism, patriotism and patience

“‘ [388] mightily to have you come so bright and smiling, asking us how we do, and saying always some pleasant word, and giving us something good to read. Then we love to hear you sing to us. Sometimes it makes the tears come in our eyes, but it kind oa lifts us up, and makes us feel better. We sometimes wonder you come here so much among us poor fellows, but we have come to the conclusion that your heart is in the cause for which we are fighting, and that you want to help and cheer us so that we may get well and go back to our regiments, and finish up the work of putting down this infernal rebellion.’ ”

“One day as I lifted up the head of a poor boy, who was languidly drooping, and smoothed and fixed his pillow, he said, ‘Thank you; that's nice. You are so gentle and good to me that I almost fancy I am at home, and that sister Mary is waiting upon me.’ ”

“Such expressions of their interest and gratitude,” she adds, “encourage me in this work, and I keep on, though often my strength almost fails me, and my heart is filled with sadness, as I see one after another of the poor fellows wasting away, and in a few days their cots are empty and they sleep the sleep that knows no waking this side of the grave.”

Thus she labored on in her work of self-sacrificing love and devotion, with no compensation but the satisfaction that she was doing good, until late in the month of December, 1862, she was attacked with the typhoid fever, which she, no doubt, had contracted in the infected air of the hospitals, and died on the 14th of January, 1863. During her five weeks of illness her thoughts were constantly with the soldiers, and in her delirium she would imagine she was among them in their sick wards, and would often speak to them words of consolation and sympathy.

In a letter of Rev. Dr. Eliot, the Unitarian Pastor, of St. Louis, published in the Christian Register on the following May, he gives the impression she had left upon those with whom she had been sometimes associated in her labors. Miss Pettes was a