The simplest favor was sometimes most blessed in its results. The following I had entirely forgotten until reminded of it by the soldier long after he was mustered out of the service. The summer of 1864, while in a hospital at White House landing, he had a severe attack of neuralgia. As I was passing one day through the ward in which he was lying, he inquired if I knew of anything that would relieve him. I recommended something--I do not remember what--which I promised to bring him the next day; but when, returning to my quarters, I began to think of his sufferings, and his look of appeal for help, I could not rest until my remedy had been tried. Though nearly night, and more than half a mile distant, I returned with the medicine, bathed his face, gave directions for its use, and left him with the assurance that it would help him. I never saw him again, until the time to which I refer, when he called my mind to this circumstance. “Oh,” said he, “that medicine acted like a charm; it effected a perfect cure; for from that hour neuralgia and I parted friendship.” The summer of 1864 was a dark period--perhaps the darkest in the history of the rebellion. Thousands, yea, tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed at the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and those in the vicinity of Petersburg, seemingly to little or no purpose; yet they all had reference to the grand result soon to be achieved. The terrific explosion of the 30th of July was distinctly heard at our quarters, a distance of ten miles. Among the many who fell upon that fearful day, was the eldest son of Rev. Alfred Cornell, of Ionia--an exemplary, Christian young man, whose life was full of promise. But as “Death loves a shining mark,” one of his deadly shafts was aimed at him. The object of those weeks of mining was not obtained; Petersburg was not taken, Richmond was lost, and our starving soldiers must wait many more long months before the day of their release dawns. Oh! how many times during war’s dark hours we felt like exclaiming, “The dead are everywhere! The mountain-side, the plain, the wood profound, All the wide earth, the fertile and the fair, Is one vast burying-ground!” But we are comforted with the thought that they died not in vain. No, “They have fallen, they have fallen, In the battles of the free, And their fame will be remembered In the ages yet to be. * * * * * “They have fallen, they have fallen, In a high and holy cause, Fighting for our starry banner, For our country and its laws; For the glorious cause of freedom, For the land our fathers loved; For the rights, which, spite of sceptres, Man proclaimed and God approved.