The parties were brought to this city on Friday, and lodged in the old Capital prison. As they passed along the avenue, under the guard of soldiers, they appeared to be quite indifferent as to their fate and the enormity and baseness of the crime with which they are charged. The majority of them presented a very respectable appearance, and were followed to jail by an anxious crowd of men and boys. Clara Barton asked her father his opinion of the feasibility of her getting to the front. He did not discourage the idea. He knew his daughter and believed her capable of accomplishing what she set out to do. Moreover, he knew the American soldier. He felt sure that Clara would be protected from insult, and that her presence would be welcome to the soldiers. Having thus been favorably introduced to Governor Andrew, and her story of the secret operations of Secessionists near Washington having been confirmed, she felt that she could write the Governor and ask him for permission to go to the very seat of war. She had been sending supplies to Roanoke, and Newbern, North Carolina, and she wished very much that, as soon as her father should have passed away, she might be permitted to go with her supplies and perform her own work of distribution. From her father’s bedside she wrote the following letter to Governor Andrew: NORTH OXFORD, Mar. 20, 1862 TO HIS EXCELLENCY JOHN A. ANDREW, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Governor Andrew will perhaps recollect the writer as the lady who waited upon him in company with Hon. Alexander De Witt, to mention the existence of certain petitions from the officers of the Massachusetts Regiments of Volunteers, relating to the establishment of an agency in the City of Washington. With the promise of Your Excellency to “look after the leak” came a “lessening of my fears,” and the immediate discovery of the truly magnificent rebel organization in Alexandria, and the arrest of twenty-five of the principal actors, including the _purchasing committee_, brought with it not only entire satisfaction, but a joy I had scarce known in months. Since September I had been fully conscious in my own mind of the existence of something of this kind, and in October attempted to warn our Relief Societies, but, in the absence of all proof, I must perforce _say_ very little. I should never have brought the subject before you again, only that I incidentally learned that our excellent Dr. Hitchcock has taken back from Roanoke other papers relating to the same subject, which will doubtless be laid before you, and, as I have an entirely different boon to crave, I find it _necessary_ to speak.