My oldest brother Joshua Thomas Hastings was a home guard soldier and a teacher in Bolivar, Missouri, when the battle of Springfield was fought and General Lyon was killed. After the battle the Home Guards and Union men in general in that part of the state, had (using a war word) to skedaddle for their lives. My brother tried to make his escape to Kansas but three times was arrested by confederate scouts. Once, in a road, sheltered on either side with hazel brush and a thick undergrowth of other bushes, the leader of the band, who seemed to want to befriend my brother, whispered to him, that a majority of them (there were six or eight of them) had voted to kill him. "Now" said he, "jump for your life," As soon as said, brother leaped into the brush like a wild deer,--bang, went the cracking of half a dozen or more guns, but each shot missed except one, which just grazed the top of his shoulder. My brother then determined to return back to Bolivar, and with his family return, if possible to Indiana. In this he was successful. At this time our mother and two sisters were living in Allen County Kansas. Brother had not been back in Indiana long until he helped to raise a new company for the war and with it went into the union army. But in less than a year he was taken sick and died in an army hospital at Henderson, in Kentucky, November 14th, 1863. In the meantime I too had returned to Indiana, and, with brother's wife, went to him, when hearing he was sick. We were with him only about three hours before he died. At the end of the next two days we returned with him to our old home in old Clarksburg, (now Oden) Daviers County, Indiana, where, the next day, we buried brother by the side of our father, who had been buried nine years. This was the second death in father's family. Brother was a good man, a scholar, a soldier, and a teacher. He gave his life upon the altar of his country at the early age of thirty-six. War is a great evil, dreadful, fearful, terrible. O, for the time when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more!" Upon my return to Indiana, after an absence of nearly five years, I was quite a different person, in many respects, from what I was when I went away. I had grown in length to be six feet and two inches tall and the hair of my head and the beard of my face was as black as jet, the one standing on its ends, the other full and hanging six inches or more in length. Besides had I not been born anew and was now a new creature? Old things had passed away. Yet I went back to my old place of teaching, Tophet. With preaching added to teaching, there again I taught the urchins and preached to the sinners. And at this writing 1911, there is a new name, a new people (a converted people), a house of God and many worshippers of the Most High God. Surely the world doth grow better.