Well, Waitstill read his letters as well as she could through her blindin' tears; letters at first full of love--the very passion of love and tenderness for his sweetheart, and deathless patriotism and love for his country. But bime-by the letters changed a little in their tones--they wuzn't so full of love for his country. "The country," so he writ, "wuz shamefully neglecting its sons, neglecting their comfort." He writ they wuz herded together in quarters not fit for a dog, with insufficient food; putrid, dretful food, that no dog would or could eat. No care taken of their health--and as for the health of their souls, no matter where they wuz, if half starved or half clad, the Canteen was always present with 'em; if they could git nothin' else for their comfort, they could always git the cup that the Bible sez: "Cursed is he that puts it to his neighbor's lips." Doubly cursed now--poisoned with adulteration, makin' it a still more deadly pizen. Well, sickened with loathsome food he could not eat, half starved, the deadly typhoid hovering over the wretched soldier, is it any wonder that as the tempter held the glass to his lips (the tempter being the Government he wuz fightin' for) the tempted yielded and drank? The letters Waitstill got grew shorter and cooler, as the tempter led Alan deeper and deeper into his castle of Ruin where the demon sets and gloats over its victims. When the Canteen had done its work on the crazed brain and imbruted body, other sins and evils our Government had furnished and licensed, stood ready to draw him still further along the down-grade whose end is death. Finally the letters stopped, and then Waitstill, whose heart wuz broke, jined the noble army of nurses and went forward to the front, always hunting for the one beloved, and, as she feared, lost to her. And she found him. The very day that Alan Thorne, in a drunken brawl, killed Arvilly's husband with a bullet meant for another drunken youth, these wimmen met. A rough lookin' soldier knelt down by the dead man, a weepin' woman fell faintin' on his still, dead heart; this soldier ('twas Arville) wuz sick in bed for a week, Waitstill tendin' him, or her I might as well say, for Arville owned to her in her weakness that she wuz a woman; yes, Waitstill tended her faithfully, white and demute with agony, but kep' up with the hope that the Government that had ruined her lover would be lenient towards the crime it had caused. For she reasoned it out in a woman's way. She told Arvilly "that Alan would never have drank had not the Government put the cup to his lips, and of course the Government could not consistently condemn what it had caused to be." She reasoned it out from what she had learnt of justice and right in the Bible.