He had burned to have some part in the country's struggle, and became a model chaplain till his labors and exposure broke his health and forced him to resign.

The presence of two such men gave some hours of refined social life in the intervals of rough work.

One evening walk along the Kanawha has ever since remained in my memory associated with Whittier's poem "The River Path," as a wilder and more brilliant type of the scene he pictured.
We had walked out beyond the camp, leaving its noise and its warlike associations behind us, for a turn of the road around a jutting cliff shut it all out as completely as if we had been transported to another land, except that the distant figure of a sentinel on post reminded us of the limit of safe sauntering for pleasure.

My Presbyterian and Episcopalian friends forgot their differences of dogma, and as the sun dropped behind the mountain tops, making an early twilight in the valley, we talked of home, of patriotism, of the relation of our struggle to the world's progress, and other high themes, when "Sudden our pathway turned from night, The hills swung open to the light; Through their green gates the sunshine showed, A long, slant splendor downward flowed.
Down glade and glen and bank it rolled; It bridged the shaded stream with gold; And borne on piers of mist, allied The shadowy with the sunlit side!" The surroundings, the things of which we talked, our own sentiments, all combined to make the scene stir deep emotions for which the poet's succeeding lines seem the only fit expression, and to link the poem indissolubly with the scene as if it had its birth there.
When Wise had retreated from the valley, Colonel Tompkins had been unable to remove his family, and had left a letter commending them to our courteous treatment.

Mrs.Tompkins was a lady of refinement, and her position within our outposts was far from being a comfortable one.