[4] When father took this letter to Lawrence, he met Mr. Redpath, the _Tribune_ reporter, who requested permission to copy it for the _New York Tribune_. Before Mr. Redpath had completed his copy, the editor of the _Herald of Freedom_ demanded the manuscript to put in type. The edition of the _Herald of Freedom_ containing it was destroyed, and father only obtained a mutilated copy of it. But from that portion printed in the _Tribune_, and what was left of the _Herald of Freedom_, he secured a complete copy of the letter. [5] When Col. Sumner's soldiers were asked what they would do if they were ordered to fire on the Free State men, they replied, "We would aim above their heads." [6] When father reached the east bank it was so slippery that the oxen would not go down. So he hitched them to the back of the sled, and, with a handspike, pried it to the edge of the bank, and started it down. Of course it slid down the hill, and pulled the oxen with it. [7] Mr. May was not the blustering rough that many people suppose a frontiersman to be. He was a quiet, hard-working farmer, kind and neighborly, but ready to defend his own rights, and those of his friends, or of the poor and down-trodden. His proverbial phrase was, "Whatever I do, I want to do it so well that the world will be none the worse for my having lived in it." His son, E. E. May, says that he used to say that he learned from his Bible to hate slavery. He could lead a prayer-meeting as easily as he could lead a regiment, and he could defend the Scriptures as readily as he could defend his home. I once heard him say that he had never kept a hired man for any length of time, but that he succeeded in persuading him to join the church before he left him. MRS. R. B. H.