The 20th of April, the Twenty-sixth Michigan, according to orders, left Alexandria for the Peninsula. How much we missed them when they were gone, how sad we felt, and how we all cried when the boat shoved out from shore that was to bear them away to the field of strife! How long the injunction, “Take good care of Willie,” rang in my ears! How lonely that old building looked where Company “I” had been quartered! How deserted the old campground appeared, how anxiously we watched for any intelligence from the Twenty-sixth, and how frequently letters were received, ending with “Pray for me,” and how often and earnestly we did pray that they might all be kept from falling in the fierce conflict; but, if fall they must, that they might be made meet for the kingdom of heaven. Their sick were left at Alexandria. I had something over a hundred names of my list belonging to this regiment. A large number were very ill, and many of them soon went to their long home. Oh, what a long array of those poor sufferers pass before me in imagination as I write! There is one delirious with fever; he is constantly talking of home and mother. “My mother, dear mother, with weak, tearful eye, Farewell, and God bless you forever and aye; Oh! that I now lay on your pillowing breast, To breathe my last sigh on the bosom first pressed.” But in the stillness of the night, with no dear mother there, he passed away. Here is another, a young man from my own county, over whom for many weeks I had anxiously watched; his aged father is sent for; the poor boy still lingers day after day and week after week, but at length he yields up his young life to the “King of Terrors,” and the gray-headed sire is bereft of the staff of his declining years. Here again are two, lying side by side in the same hospital; one lingers long with typhoid pneumonia, the other is an intense sufferer with rheumatic fever, who goes only two days before his comrade. In the same ward is another--a Massachusetts soldier--to whom it was my privilege frequently to take some little delicacy. He is recovering from a long run of fever; is able to be about the ward, with a fair prospect of going home soon on furlough, when he is suddenly seized with that disease of all others the most dreaded--small-pox; he is removed to the “Pest House,” and we see him no more. Here is still another, wounded in the head; he has become a raving maniac, and is carried off to the Insane Asylum. There are others, many others, but the catalogue would be too long to mention them all, yet such will ever be held in sacred remembrance. Oh! sad memories of the past, how deeply are ye stirred! The dying soldier haunts me still! * * * * * Dying ’mong strangers--dying at night, Far from his home and his kindred so dear, Far from the loved ones he left for the fight, When he bade them farewell, with a kiss and a tear.