The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

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plates and famous battle flags, entitled "1My Story of the
War,"* which has reached a sale of about sixty thousand
copies. I shall never fail to congratulate myself, that I was
identified with the work of the Sanitacry Commission during
the great Civil War. In no other way could I have learned
"How close to grandeur is our dust,
How near to God is man,")
than through my labors at the rear of battle-fields, in
hospitals, and in camps. If there had ever been a timie in
my life, when I regarded the lowest tier of human beings
with indifference or aversion, I outgrew it during the war.
History boasts of one Philip Sydney, who forgot his rank
and his anguish, and yielded the cup of water from which
he was about to slake his thirst, to a dying soldier, whose
longing eyes were fastened upon it. But I knew scores of
brave fellows, who not only endured the keenest suffering
patiently, that others more needy than themselves might
first receive attention, but who declined the furlough that
would have taken them home for a fortnight's vacation
among kindred and friends, in behalf of some poor fellow
who was so homesick that only the sight of his humble
home, his wife and children, could save him from death.
On one occasion, when. going from ward to ward of a
hospital, in Helena, Arkansas, I came upon a poor fellow
evidently near death. He accepted my offer to write a letter
to his mother, but, pointing to a comrade in the next bed, said,
* MY STORY OF THE WAR: A woman's narrative of four
years' personal experience as nurse in the Union Army A complete
and thrilling record of the author's experiences among sick and wounded
soldiers in hospitals, camps, at the front, and on the battle-field. With