I shall never forget a tour which I made with a relief agent through the wards for the blacks, both because it showed me what a watchful supervision a really faithful person can exercise, and because it gave such an opportunity to observe closely the conduct of these people. The demeanor of the colored patients is really beautiful,--so gentle, so polite, so grateful for the least kindness. And then the evidences of a desire for mental improvement and religious life which meet you everywhere are very touching. Go from bed to bed, and you see in their hands primers, spelling-books, and Bibles, and the poor, worn, sick creatures, the moment they feel one throb of returning health, striving to master their alphabet or spell out their Bible. In the evening, or rather in the fading twilight, some two hundred of them crept from the wards, and seated themselves in a circle around a black exhorter. Religion to them was a real thing; and so their worship had the beauty of sincerity, while I ought to add that it was not marked by that grotesque extravagance sometimes attributed to it. One cannot but think better of the whole race after the experience of such a Sabbath. The only drawback to your satisfaction is, that they die quicker and from less cause than the whites. They have not the same stubborn hopefulness and hilarity. Why, indeed, should they have? Speaking of the white soldiers, everybody who goes into their hospitals is happily disappointed,--you see so much order and cheerfulness, and so little evidence of pain and misery. The soldier is quite as much a hero in the hospital as on the battle-field. Give him anything to be cheerful about, and he will improve the opportunity. You see men who have lost an arm or a leg, or whose heads have been bruised almost out of likeness to humanity, as jolly as they can be over little comforts and pleasures which ordinary eyes can hardly see with a magnifying-glass. So it happens that a camp of six thousand sick and wounded, which seems at a distance a concentration of human misery that you cannot bear to behold, when near does not look half so lugubrious as you expected; and you are tempted to accuse the sick men of having entered into a conspiracy to look unnaturally happy.