The journey had been full of irritating discomforts. Heat, dust, and soiled linen are only annoyances to a man; they are real miseries to a woman. The marvel is not that Joan of Arc dared the perils of battle, but that she endured the continued wretchedness of camp uncleanliness, to the triumphant end.

With her throat parched, garments "sticky," hair, eyes, ears and nostrils filled with irritating dust, and a feeling that collar and cuffs were, as ladies phrase it, "a sight to behold," Rachel's heoric enthusiasm ebbed to the bottom. Ushered into the Surgeon's office she was presented to a red-faced, harsh-eyed man, past the middle age, who neither rose nor apologized to her for being discovered in the undress of a hot day. He montioned her to a seat with the wave of the fan he was vigorously using, and taking her letter of introduction, adjusted eye-glasses upon a ripe-colored nose, and read it with a scowl that rippled his face with furrows.

"So you're the first of the women nurses that's to be assigned to me," he said ungraciously, after finishing the letter, and scanning her severely for a moment over the top of his glasses. "I suppose I have to have 'em."