A thousand evidences of the loving care and energetic labor of the patient ones at home, telling an affecting story that knocked hard at the gates of the heart, were the portals ever so firmly closed; and with all these came letters written by poor, ignorant ones who often had no knowledge of how such communications should be addressed. These letters, making inquiries concerning patients from anxious relatives at home, directed oftener to my office than my home, came in numbers, and were queer mixtures of ignorance, bad grammar, worse spelling, and simple feeling. However absurd the style, the love that filled them chastened and purified them. Many are stored away, and though irresistibly ludicrous, are too sacred to print for public amusement. In them could be detected the prejudices of the different sections. One old lady in upper Georgia wrote a pathetic appeal for a furlough for her son. She called me "My dear sir," while still retaining my feminine address, and though expressing the strongest desire for her son's restoration to health, entreated in moving accents that if his life could not be spared, that he should not be buried in "Ole Virginny dirt"--rather a derogatory term to apply to the sacred soil that gave birth to the Presidents,--the soil of the Old Dominion. Almost all of these letters told the same sad tale of destitution of food and clothing; even shoes of the roughest kind being either too expensive for the mass or unattainable by the expenditure of any sum, in many parts of the country. For the first two years of the war, privations were lightly dwelt upon and courageously borne, but when want and suffering pressed heavily, as times grew more stringent, there was a natural longing for the stronger heart and frame to bear part of the burden. Desertion is a crime that meets generally with as much contempt as cowardice, and yet how hard for the husband or father to remain inactive in winter quarters, knowing that his wife and little ones were literally starving at home--not even at home, for few homes were left. LIFE IN RICHMOND DURING THE WAR [Southern Historical Papers, Volume 19. From the _Cosmopolitan_, December, 1891; by Edward M. Alfriend.]