"At the hospital we found poor Bayard. Of all the ghastly wounds I saw that day his was the most awful. It needed but a glance to see, as he calmly stated to those who visited him, "that his days on earth were numbered." If his wound had been a mere scratch, he could not have been more cool, quiet, and collected. He talked calmly of his death as of a settled thing, and only inquired particularly how much time he had left on earth. He was told, 'perhaps forty-eight hours.' He did not live twenty-four. My heart sank within me as he gave me his hand in farewell, and I almost murmured, 'Why are the best taken?' The large house to which the wounded were brought was now filled with mutilated and dying men. Cries and groans resounded from every apartment. Ghastly and bloody wounds met the eye in every direction. Some had their eyes shot out; the tongues of some were swollen out of their mouths; some had their bodies shot through; others were torn and mangled by shell and solid shot, and all were crowded wherever there was any space. The surgeons were hacking off limbs and arms by the dozen. The odor of blood was oppressive. One man called me to him, thinking I was a surgeon, and said that one of his wounds had been dressed, but he found that he had another, which was bleeding rapidly. Another poor fellow held up his arm to me, with a great bulging hole in it, and asked with an expression of pain and anxiety that I could scarcely endure, whether I thought he would have to lose it? Such is the horrid reality of war behind the painted scenes of honor, glory, and romance. However cold an ear the poor fellows may have turned to the story of the Cross when in health, as a general thing they were ready enough now to listen to the offers of mercy. One wounded boy had his leg taken off just as he was entering the hospital, which building was under fire all day, and was repeatedly struck. The scene from the windows of the hospital was truly splendid as night came on. Innumerable camp-fires gleamed from the hillsides, and occasionally the darkness was lighted up by the flash of cannon. But weariness, and the knowledge that our own regiment might be engaged the next day, caused me to seek a place of rest. The medical department of our brigade had been rendered small by the absence of some of its members, and it might be that our duties on the morrow would be very arduous. The ground outside the hospital was so tramped up, muddy, and filled with horses, that it was impossible to sleep there. But there was a stone alley-way under the hospital, filled with tobacco in the leaf, part of it lying on the ground, and part drying overhead. One end of this place was already filled with wounded men, but the surgeon in charge said that the other would not be occupied before morning,