George H. Gordon, From Brook Farm to Cedar Mountain

[82] General Banks's staff, in some details of field engineering. Here the Sibley tents proved themselves worthy of their reputation; for they held in warmth and in comfort some sixteen or seventeen soldiers in each, around a fire beneath the iron tripod that supported the single pole, while the smoke curled out of a hole at the top. Here, too, we received two thousand pairs of stocking from Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, one thousand collected in ten days,--votive offerings for our regiment. Some of them were from the young ladies at Professor Agassiz's school, at Cambridge; and these were like the world when it was without form and void. Some were from Campton Village, in New Hampshire, with names of knitters stitched on them, and they were of colors red, white, and blue; and there were prizes in them, pin-cushions, needle-cases, Life of Havelock, the real Christian soldier, moral tracts, and much that tended to make the knapsack heavier on many a weary march. Poor fellows! how many were to struggle onward under that weary load, at last to expose to some stranger's eye the little Bible, or the dear letter, or the loving token from a home the soldier never more should gaze upon! Friend or foe, whoever he may be, the heart will ache for such in sympathy. Said an Indiana colonel to me at this camp, “Some of my boys shot some of the enemy's pickets; they got their knapsacks, and found them filled with letters from home and nice things beautifully made by the Southern women.”

Hardly had we arrived at this camp, when Captain Cary made application to me for permission to cross the river and get reliable intelligence of the missing in the recent massacre at Ball's Bluff. I gave my assent, moved by the feeling that it might bring relief to fathers and mothers, to wives and children, to know that some of the absent of the fight were held as prisoners, and not dead beneath the