captured forty-three waggon-loads of medical
stores. Within three days, sixteen waggon-
loads of drugs and medicines, the gift of the
country through the Sanitary Commission, were
at the disposal of the army; and at Centreville,
on the road from Bull Run to Washington, the
Commission's agents served out to the wounded,
who came fainting in by hundreds, hot beef-tea,
soup and bread, and stimulants— gathered them
into ambulances or hospitals— and otherwise
helped them on to Washington. The Commission
has always extended such help alike to friend
or foe; the wounded Confederate who has been
captured has been simply regarded as a sufferer.

These labourers on behalf of humanity even
work under fire in the field relief corps that trot
up their light waggons with stores, bandages,
or other aid to the surgeons wherever men fall
fastest, and after the battle hunt indefatigably
for the straggling wounded. The Commission
has organised, also, a distinct department of
Special Relief for care of the sick among newly-
arrived regiments; for providing temporary and
gratuitous shelter and food to the soldier honourably
discharged, while he is waiting in any city
for his papers and his pay; for helping the helpless
soldier in any conceivable way, by acting as
his unpaid agent, or attorney; for protecting
him against sharpers, or getting him railway
tickets at reduced rates. With such views
soldiers' " Homes " have been established
throughout the North, and at the principal
Home in Washington about a hundred thousand
nights' lodgings, and three or four hundred
thousand meals, have been gratuitously provided.
The Commission has obtained Homes, too, for its
own and the army's nurses when not in attendance
on the sick, or preparing to depart for
distant stations. Finally, the Commission charges
itself with the duty of seeing that every soldier is
decently buried, with a head-stone over his grave,
and that a record is kept of the place of burial;
or, that his body is forwarded to his friends.

The funds that support all this good work
are voluntary gifts. The people of California
sent, in one sum, the gold of their soil to the
value of a hundred thousand pounds English
money. Sanitary fairs have been lately held at
different towns, at Chicago, Cincinnati, Rochester,
Washington, &c. Brooklyn Fair lately
contributed four hundred thousand dollars; and
from the great fair just held at New York a
million dollars were expected.

The Commission works openly; any one
who will, may inspect its books. It pays its
officers, buys waggons, charters ships, feeds
horses and mules, pays rent of offices and
warehouses, yet the entire cost of its management is
under three per cent of its income. When, at
the battle of Gettysburg, a waggon-load of the
Commissioners' stores was captured, with three of
its agents, the secretary of the Commission asked
and obtained from the Confederate authorities
their release, on the ground that they were non-
combatants, and that throughout the war " the
Sanirary Commission had never made any distinction
in its benevolence between friend and foe."

If any one would estimate the value of such
work in pursuance of a good example, let him
remember that Miss Nightingale and the Crimean
Commission found the British army in the East
dying from disease at the rate of sixty per cent,
or more than half its whole strength, in the year;
and that, sanitary care having been taken, the
death rate was reduced in the last five months
of the campaign to twelve in a thousand! The
army was made fifty-two times healthier! Our
whole average yearly loss by disease in the
Peninsular war, was a hundred and thirteen in a
thousand; and the sanitary reforms made by Lord
Herbert in the home life of our infantry are saving
us now, every year, one life in every hundred
men. The whole loss in our army by all diseases
has been less in each of the last four years than it
used to be from diseases of the lungs alone.

Most nobly have the American People struggled
to amend this part of the record of their own
disastrous struggle. We read much of sharp
trading and selfish grasping, of boots with paper
soles, and other cruel dealings of the wooden
nutmeg school; but the support given by the
American People (not American Contractors)
to their armies, through the Sanitary
Commission, tells a nobler tale. Thus, for
example, it may seem a small matter that the
Commission makes part of its preventive work
to consist in the raising of fresh vegetables
for army use; but without fresh vegetables
troops can hardly be saved from scurvy.
Dr.Frank H. Hamilton, a distinguished medical
inspector in the army of Rosecrans, expressed,
in a report, his full belief that " one barrel of
potatoes per annum is to the government equal
to one man." At one time, when the success
of the western army, in a hazardous operation,
was becoming hopeless, by reason of scurvy
among the troops, and when the consequent
advertisement of a commissary for fifty thousand
bushels of potatoes and a corresponding supply
of other vegetables found no trader able or willing
to be responsible for their delivery, the
Commission set to work, and, collecting voluntary
gifts in kind from the fields and gardens of the
districts, supplied gratuitously, within a month,
six thousand barrels of fresh vegetables, restored
the health of the troops, and so, though a non-
combatant, did really, by a brisk discharge of
potatoes, change in that campaign the fortune of
the war.

A RENT IN A CLOUD.

IN TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTERS.
CHAPTER XII. DARKER AND DARKER.

THERE was an unusual depression at the
villa— each had his or her own load of anxiety,
and each felt that an atmosphere of gloom was
thickening around, and, without being able to
say why or wherefore, that dark days were
coming.

" Among your letters this morning was there
none from the vicar, Mr. Calvert?" asked Miss
Grainger, as he sat smoking his morning cigar
under the porch of the cottage.