Wednesday Night, May 28.
Have nearly finished the “Elm City,” with five hundred beds. Our linen-closets, store-closets, and pantries in perfect order. The hardest piece of work I have done yet was to keep two colored ladies (from the Lee estate) steady to the work of scrubbing the lower deck. They escaped so many times on pretence of getting fresh water that, weary of running after them, I came to think it was easier to run after the water; so, pressing David Haight into the service, he and I kept up a solemn procession to and from the ship’s boilers, bearing the steaming buckets.
Mrs. Reading, an excellent surgical nurse trained in the Crimea under Miss Nightingale, who has been attached to the “staff” from the beginning, went up to the Shore hospital to-day. Mr. Olmsted has promised, with great reluctance which I do not comprehend, to let me go to-morrow; so we are to start early, with as much beef-stock, stimulants, and other supplies as we can carry. Mrs. Reading has taught me a great many things. I pump her extensively in our leisure moments. She was at Kulali throughout the Russian War.
