This was my initiation month. I spent my time in preparing and distributing supplies to the hospitals in the city--of which there were fourteen, including some twenty different buildings--and the surrounding camps. These hospitals would accommodate from two to fifteen hundred patients each. All of the largest and finest private residences, the churches--with two exceptions--school buildings, and hotels, were converted into hospitals. The largest of these was the “Mansion House,” formerly known as the old “Braddock House,” in one of the rooms of which--at this time used for an office--General George Washington held his Councils of War. The same old furniture was still in use. Our Michigan soldiers were scattered through all these hospitals, and to find out and visit every one was no small task, it being almost a day’s work to go through one of the largest. After having gone the rounds once, and obtained a list of the names of those I was to visit, the number of their ward, and what each one needed, the work of supplying these wants would have been comparatively light, were it not for the changes which were constantly taking place by death, discharges, transfers, furloughs, new arrivals, and returns to duty, which were of almost daily occurrence. In my visits to these hospitals I seldom went empty-handed; sometimes taking cooked tomatoes or stewed fruit, at others, chicken broth, pickles, butter, cheese, jelly, tea hot from the stove, and, in addition to these, I would frequently buy oranges, lemons, and fresh fruit, according as the appetite seemed to crave. Besides, I gave out clothing to those most in need--such as shirts, drawers, socks, slippers, dressing-gowns, towels and handkerchiefs, also stationery and reading-matter. During this month I received a nice box of goods from Ionia. Could the donors have known how much good that one box did, they would have felt amply repaid for all they ever did for the soldiers, and encouraged to renewed efforts in the good work. I made several visits to old “Camp Convalescent”--very properly called “Camp Misery”--which was about a mile and a half from the city. Pen would fail to describe one-half its wretchedness. Here were from ten to fifteen thousand soldiers--not simply the convalescent, but the sick and dying--many of them destitute, with not even a blanket or an overcoat, having little or no wood, their rations consisting of salt pork and “hard tack,” whatever else might have been issued they had no fire with which to do the cooking, consequently much of the time they were obliged to eat their pork raw. Oh! how many times my heart was wrung with pity, and indignation too, on seeing those shivering forms with their thin, pale faces, cold and hunger-pinched, sitting upon the sunny side of their tents, eating their scanty meal.