There was no combating this reasoning, and in a short time I received a beautiful answer to my letter, well written and well expressed, confirming all that Robinson had told us:--That he was the youngest son, and had always been carefully and tenderly brought up; that he had two brothers, the only other children--one had gone to Texas, before the breaking out of the rebellion, and never having heard from him since, they feared he had been pressed into the rebel service; fortunately she had never heard, and I trust, now, never may hear what Robinson had told us,--that, while pressing on, at the battle of Fair Oaks, over heaps of the enemy’s dead, he saw an up-turned face on the field, wounded or dead, he knew not which,--that face, he said, he never could mistake--it was that of his brother! We tried to convince him that this was most improbable--that his imagination was excited at the time, and that the dread that such a thing might happen had been “father to the thought;” but in vain; we never could persuade him to the contrary; and yet, whether from a doubt in his mind, or the dread of the pain it must cause, he never, as we afterwards found, had made any allusion to the subject in his letters home. One morning, after he had been able to be about, and even out for some weeks, I was surprised, on going into his ward, to find him in bed again. “Why, Robinson, I am sorry to see you there! What have you been doing?” He hesitated, twisted the end of his coverlet, but made no answer. “Nothing wrong, I’m very sure of that. It wasn’t your own fault, was it?” said I, fearing he thought I doubted him, as so many of the relapses here are caused by excess, the moment the men are able to be out, and I well knew there was no such danger here. He looked up at me, at once, with his clear, honest eyes, and said, “Yes, Miss ----, all my own fault; but I thought _she_ worried so----” “Your mother?” I questioned. “Yes, ma’am; and if I could just slip my arm into my coat-sleeve long enough to have my picture taken, she’d see it was better, and it would set her mind at rest more than all the letters I could write.”