Abby Howland Woolsey to Georgeanna and Eliza.
New York, May 2nd.
My Dear Girls: We have received this, morning your letter of Monday and Tuesday (Georgy’s) written at intervals and mailed off Ship Point. What a strange life you are leading on board a hospital ship, sewing hospital flags, dispensing medicines, etc., etc. You two have always been together in the queerest and most varied circumstances, and in all parts of the world, from the heart of the Mammoth Cave to the top of the Pyramids of Egypt, in peace; and now, in war. You did not inclose the ward-list, but “Dr. Woolsey,” we feel confident, is a joke on Georgy. She deserves a title of the sort, I am sure. You thought of everything it seems, even to a flat-iron. . . . We seem to be sitting at home impotent and imbecile. It costs us no trouble to order home a few pieces of mosquito bar from Holmes’, or a few dozen towels from Milliken’s—and even these are sitting under the piano waiting. We have screwed the bandage-roller on again, and the little table stands with strips of cotton and pins and labels just as it stood one year ago, when Georgy fired away with it day after day,—between the folding doors of the parlors.
Mother came home yesterday from Philadelphia, leaving Hatty at the Hodge’s. Aspinwall, wife and baby are there. We think Mother looks well. She brought a few of Joe’s photographs. What a keen, alert, decided look he has, as becomes a Colonel and a man who has done a year’s military duty! Soon after Mother, came Mary, Robert and May to dine and spend the night. This happened very nicely, as it was Mother’s first evening at home after Washington. . . .
What great events are happening! Awhile ago, two such things as the fall of New Orleans and of Fort Macon in one week would have crazed us with surprise and delight. We are almost blasés in such matters. . . . It is a good joke and commentary on the southern doctrine of “State rights” that the Governor of North Carolina has been arrested in Richmond, Virginia, for “Unionism”!
