If you go back now six or thirteen miles to the field hospitals, you find nothing essentially different. The system and its practical workings are the same. But it is a perpetual astonishment to find that here, near to the banks of a river that has not a respectable village on its shores from Fortress Monroe to Richmond,--here, in a houseless and desolate land which can be reached only by roads which are intersected by gullies, which plunge into sloughs of despond, which lose themselves in the ridges of what were once cornfields, or meander amid stumps of what so lately stood a forest,--that here you have every comfort for the sick: all needed articles of clothing, the shirts and drawers, the socks and slippers; and all the delicacies, too, the farinas, the jellies, the canned meats and fruits, the concentrated milk, the palatable drinks and stimulants, and even fresh fruits and vegetables. And in such profusion, too! I asked the chief agent of the Commission in the Ninth Corps how many orders he filled in a day. "Look for yourself." I took down the orders; and there they were, one hundred and twenty strong, some for little and some for much, some for a single article and some for a dozen articles. But it is not in camps of long standing that the wounded and sick suffer for want of care or lack of comforts. It is when the base is suddenly changed, when all order is broken up, when there are no tents at hand, when the stores are scattered, nobody knows where, after a great battle perhaps, and the wounded are pouring in upon you like a flood, and when it seems as if no human energy and no mortal capacity of transportation could supply the wants both of the well and the sick, the almost insatiable demands of the battle-field and the equally unfathomable needs of the hospital, it is then that the misery comes, and it is then that the Commission does its grandest work. After the Battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania, twenty-five thousand wounded were crowded into Fredericksburg, where but ten thousand were expected. For a time supplies of all kinds seemed to be literally exhausted. There were no beds. There was not even straw. There were not surgeons enough nor attendants enough. There was hardly a supply of food. Some found it difficult to get a drop of cold water. Poor, wounded men, who had wearily trudged from the battle-field and taken refuge in a deserted house, remained hours and a day without care, and without seeing the face of any but their wounded comrades. Then the Sanitary Commission sent its hundred and fifty agents to help the overburdened surgeons. Then every morning it despatched its steamer down the Potomac crowded with necessaries and comforts. Then with ceaseless industry its twenty wagons, groaning under their burden, went to and fro over the wretched road from Belle Plain to Fredericksburg. A credible witness says that for several days nearly all the bandages and a large proportion of the