Of course I tried to cheer him up. I’d been around visitin’ the Illinois boys in the hospitals that day and I just lit in and told him how comfortable I’d found ’em and how chipper most of them seemed. “You’d think ’twas fun to be in the hospital to see some of ’em, Mr. Lincoln,” I said. “What do you suppose old Tom Blodgett was doin’? Settin’ up darnin’ his socks. Yes, sir, insisted on doin’ it himself. Said them socks had fit all the way from Washington to Richmond. They’d stood by him and he was goin’ to stand by them. Goin’ to dress their wounds as good as the doctor had his. Never saw anything so funny as that big feller propped up there tryin’ to darn like he’d seen his mother do and all the time makin’ fun. All the boys around were laffin’ at him--called him the sock doctor. “And things were so clean and white and pretty and the women were runnin’ around just like home.” “God bless ’em,” he said. “I don’t know what we’d ’a’ done if it hadn’t been for the way the women have taken hold. Come down here willin’ to do anything; women that never saw a cut finger before, will stand over a wound so terrible men will faint at the sight of it. I’ve known of women spendin’ whole nights on a battlefield huntin’ for somebody they’d lost and stoppin’ as they went to give water and take messages. I’ve known ’em to work steady for three days and nights without a wink of sleep down at the front after a battle, takin’ care of the wounded. Here in Washington you can’t stop ’em as long as they can see a thing to be done. At home they’re supportin’ the families and workin’ day and night to help us. They give their husbands and their boys and then themselves. God bless the women, Billy. We can’t save the Union without ’em. “It makes a difference to the boys in a hospital havin’ ’em. People don’t realize how young this army is. Half the wounded here in Washington to-day are _children_--not twenty yet--lots of ’em under eighteen. Children who never went to sleep in their lives before they went into the army without kissin’ their mothers good-night. You take such a boy as that and let him lie in camp a few months gettin’ more and more tired of it and he gets homesick--plain homesick--he wants his mother. Perhaps he don’t know what’s the matter and he wouldn’t admit it if he did. First thing you know he’s in the hospital with camp fever, or he gets wounded. I tell you a woman looks good to him.