I have repeated the whole of this story as I heard it, while we were floating slowly down the river, because the poor man who told it me died soon after we got on board, kindly attended in his last moments by our Sisters of Mercy. A letter to his mother was found in his pocket, and one of the ladies is writing to her.
This morning we returned to Yorktown, and took on the _Elm City_ thirty more sick from a steamboat which had brought them from Cumberland on the Pamunkey.
At ten o'clock the _Elm City_ left for Washington with 440 patients.... After noon I went ashore, called on the surgeon in charge of the hospitals and the Military Governor, made our arrangements for a trip up the river to collect scattered sick, and to tow our _Wilson Small_ up to West Point for repairs. She has been knocked into and run against by all the big boats till she is completely disabled. Returning on board for this purpose, was met by an officer with a telegram, begging that a boat might be immediately despatched to Bigelow's Landing, where an ambulance-train master had reported that "a hundred sick had been left on the ground in the rain, without attendance or food, to die." Bigelow's Landing being up a narrow, shoal, crooked creek, we ran about the harbor looking in vain for a boat of sufficiently light draught to send there. At length we determined to take our whole Sanitary fleet to the mouth of the creek, and, leaving the _Alida_ and _Knickerbocker_ outside, try to get up with the _Elizabeth_, for we had no single vessel, large or small, in itself, suitably provided.
We ran to the _Knickerbocker_, but before we could get her under way a steamboat, in charge of a military surgeon, came along-side, and a letter was handed me, begging that I would take care of one hundred and fifty sick men who had been taken on at West Point early in the morning, and who had had no nourishment during the day. It was sunset, stormy and cold. I at first hesitated, on account of the greater need of those at Bigelow's Landing, but the surgeon in charge having induced me to take a look into the cabin, I changed my mind. The little room was as full as it could be crammed of sick soldiers, sitting on the floor; there was not room to lie down. Only two or three were at full length; one of these was dying,—was dead the next time I looked in. It was frightfully dirty, and the air suffocating.