A young lady who volunteered as a nurse just after the first battle of Bull Run was Miss Hattie A. Dada, also of New York. She worked incessantly through the entire war, part of the time in the Eastern and part in the Western armies. She was taken prisoner by the Confederates after the retreat of General Banks in the Shenandoah Valley, and was held three months. After her release she spent two years in the hospitals at Murfreesboro, a very arduous field of labor. [Illustration: 9261] Philadelphia was a point which received Hi a large number of soldiers who passed through that city, either going to the front or going home on furlough--often disabled. Several ladies established an eating-house for their benefit, where they could obtain meals free. {253} [Illustration: 0262] One of the most tireless workers in this direction was Mrs. Mary B. Wade, who, in spite of her being over seventy years of age, never left her post save {254}for necessary sleep, but waited on them night and day, during the four years of the conflict. [Illustration: 8263] There were many other opportunities for women to work in the cause. Bazars were held, materials were solicited and manufactured for sale, speeches were made, arousing patriotic sentiments, and societies were formed to assist formed to assist the families of soldiers. There was no end to the calls for kindly offices. Among the foremost of those who turned their talents to this use, was Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, of Boston, the celebrated pulpit orator. Her efforts were given freely to making the Northwestern Sanitary Fair, held at Chicago, an immense success. Perhaps no woman's name is so widely known, after Florence Nightingale's, of the Old World, as having labored long and unceasingly in the cause of humanity, as is that of Clara Barton. Her arduous services in field and hospital, her untiring devotion to the welfare of the soldier, her efforts to find the dead and missing, so as to send word to their kindred, her weary search in Southern prisons for news of the absent, and her formation of a corps of nurses to work for the helpless in the present war, have endeared her to every humane heart in our land. She knows no distinction--all are alike the objects of her bounteous care. And when the names of those who love their kind go down into history, Clara Barton's will be honored and revered among the first killed at Cold Harbor; it unnerved her so that her own death followed soon, and on the 27th of July, 1864, she passed away to a heavenly shore. {255} [Illustration: 0264] [Illustration: 8265] The famous author, Louisa M. Alcott, whose “Little Women” almost every girl in the land has read, was a most devoted nurse in the hospitals, and afterward embodied her experiences in a book entitled “Hospital Sketches.” [Illustration: 9265]