I cannot make a pleasant letter of this; everything is sad; the very pain which is breathed out in the atmosphere of this city is enough to sadden any human heart. Five thousand suffering men, and room preparing for eight thousand more,--poor, fevered, cut-up wretches, it agonizes me to think of it. I go when I can; to-day am having a visit from a little Massachusetts (Lowell) boy, seventeen, his widowed mother’s only child, whom I found recovering from fever in Mount Pleasant Hospital. It had left him with rheumatism. He was tender, and, when I asked him “what he wanted,” burst in tears and said, “I want to _see my mother_. She didn’t know when I left.” I appealed to the chief surgeon and applied for his discharge as a native of Massachusetts. It was promised me, and, when the astonished little fellow heard it, he threw himself across the back of his chair and sobbed so he could scarcely get his breath. He had been ordered to another hospital next day; the order was checked; this was a week ago, and _yesterday he came to me discharged_, and with forty-three dollars and some new clothes. I send him on _to-night_ to his mother as a Sunday present. She knows nothing of it, only that he is suffering in hospital. I am ungrateful to be heavy-hearted when I have been able to do _only that little_. His name is William Diggles, nephew of Jonas Diggles, tailor of New Sharon, Maine. Authentic news of battles reached Washington slowly. At first there was no certainty whether a battle was a battle or only a skirmish. Then, when it became certain that a battle had been fought, the first news was almost always unreliable. It would have been a great advantage if Clara Barton could have known where a battle was to be fought. Manifestly, she could not always know. The generals in command did not always know. But there were times when official Washington had premonitory information. She sought to establish relationship with sufficiently high authority to enable her to know in advance where such battles were to be fought as were brought on by a Union offensive. On Saturday night, September 13, 1862, she had secret information that a great battle was about to be fought. A small battle had been fought the day before and it had been disastrous. There had been an engagement at Harper’s Ferry in which the Union army had 44 killed, 173 wounded, and the amazing number of 12,520 missing or captured. She already suspected, and a little later she knew, that that long list of men missing and captured, was more ominous than an added number killed or wounded: “Our army was weary,” she said, “and lacked not only physical strength, but confidence and spirit. And why should they not? Always defeated! Always on the retreat! I was almost demoralized myself! And I had just commenced.”