The Clendenons were in the same hospital, and in the performance of their several duties the trio often met, when a sweet sentence of praise from the lady, and a cheerful word of encouragement from him, went far to keep up her flagging spirits, and stimulate her to renewed exertions. Her strong, healthy constitution upheld her well in those days; for the fiery scourge rolled on and on like some great prairie fire, hourly seizing fresh victims, and erecting its everlasting monuments in the long rows of new-made graves in the cemeteries that swelled upward, side by side, close and many, like the green billows of old ocean, save that they gave back no solemn, tolling dirge, to tell where youth and love, hope and beauty, old age and infancy, joy and sorrow, went down to the stillness of the grave. In the universal suffering, the universal grief of those around her, the anguish of those bereaved of whole families, of friends the young lady put away her own griefs from her heart, and threw herself, heart, and soul, and body, into her work; and, though her two friends were doing precisely the same thing, they pleaded, expostulated, scolded and warned in turn. All in vain; for a rock would have flown from "its firm base" as soon as Grace Winans from the position she has taken. She had, as she pathetically protested, so little to live for, that she was all the more willing and desirous to sacrifice herself for the sake of saving others who had more ties in life than herself. "That is a poor policy," Mrs. Clendenon argued, stoutly. "You have no right to commit a moral suicide, however few your ties in life may be. Your life is God's, and He has some plan in life for you, or He would not have placed you on the earth." "And this may have been His plan for me, then," persisted the candidate for self-sacrificial honors. "He may have meant for me to take up this very cross. I have been brought to it by many subtle windings." "I do not know," Mrs. Clendenon answers, with sweet seriousness, "that God gives it to us to fathom exactly what are His plans for us. I think He means for us to take proper care of the health and strength He has given us, and to do His will in all things as near as we can, leaving to Him the fulfillment of the grand plan under which, by His fixed laws, every created being is a necessary and responsible agent." And Grace answers only by silence and sadness. For Captain Clendenon, he has long ceased to argue the question with her willful spirit, having very implicit confidence in the grand old adage that "When a woman will, she will--you may depend on't! And when she won't, she won't--and there's an end on't!" "Oddly enough," he says, trying to change the conversation from its theological turn, "I met with an old comrade to-day--one of the boys from my company--a Virginian, and one of the bravest in the regiment. He had drifted down here since the war."