Chapter VI

_Washington, March 15, 1861._ DEAREST MOTHER--I got a letter from Jeff last Sunday--he says you have a very bad cold indeed. Dear Mother, I feel very much concerned about it; I do hope it has passed over before this. Jeff wrote me about the house. I hope it will be so you can both remain in the same house; it would be much more satisfaction.... The poor boy very sick of brain fever I was with, is dead; he was only 19 and a noble boy, so good though out of his senses some eight days, though still having a kind of idea of things. No relative or friend was with him. It was very sad. I was with him considerable, only just sitting by him soothing him. He was wandering all the time. His talk was so affecting it kept the tears in my eyes much of the time. The last twenty-four hours he sank very rapidly. He had been sick some months ago and was put in the 6th Invalid Corps--they ought to have sent him home instead. The next morning after his death his brother came, a very fine man, postmaster at Lyne Ridge, Pa.--he was much affected, and well he might be.

Mother, I think it worse than ever here in the hospitals. We are getting the dregs as it were of the sickness and awful hardships of the past three years. There is the most horrible cases of diarrhoea you ever conceived of and by the hundreds and thousands; I suppose from such diet as they have in the army. Well, dear mother, I will not write any more on the sick, and yet I know you wish to hear about them. Every one is so unfeeling; it has got to be an old story. There is no good nursing. O I wish you were--or rather women of such qualities as you and Mat--were here in plenty, to be stationed as matrons among the poor sick and wounded men. Just to be present would be enough--O what good it would do them. Mother, I feel so sick when I see what kind of people there are among them, with charge over them--so cold and ceremonious, afraid to touch them. Well, mother, I fear I have written you a flighty kind of a letter--I write in haste.

WALT.

The papers came right, mother--love to Jeff, Mat, and all.