Charlotte Brontë was nineteen, and hated her job as a schoolteacher at Roe Head School in the north of England. She took a break one day in 1836 and began to write this diary entry, which quickly moves from the reality of everyday life into fantasy. Actor Barbara Feldon reads from Brontë's diary.

During the American Civil War, the poet Walt Whitman visited army hospitals, listened to soldiers' stories, and expressed the pain of a wounded nation in his journals and letters. Actor Paul Hecht reads Whitman's description of some of his visits to care for the wounded men.