An hour with my dear noble brother Stephen, during a night after a battle in front of Richmond. CLARA BARTON _My brother Stephen, when with me in front of Richmond_ Hearing a voice I crept softly down my little confiscated stairway and waited in the shadows near his bedside. He had turned his face partly into his pillow and, resting it upon his hands, was at prayer. The first words which my ear caught distinctly were, “O God, whose children we all are, look down with thine eye of justice and mercy upon this terrible conflict, and weaken the wrong and strengthen the right till this unequal contest close. O God, save my Country. Bless Abraham Lincoln and his armies.” A sob from me revealed my presence. He started, and, raising his giant skeleton form until he rested upon his elbow, he said, “I thought I was alone.” Then, turning upon me a look of mingled anxiety, pity, and horror, which I can never describe, he asked hastily, “Sister, what are those incessant sounds I hear? The whole atmosphere is filled with them; they seem like the mingled groans of human agony. I have not heard them before. Tell me what it is.” I could not speak the words that would so shock his sensitive nature, but could only stand before him humbled and penitent as if I had something to do with it all, and feel the tears roll over my face. My silence confirmed his secret suspicions, and raising himself still higher, and every previous expression of his face intensifying tenfold, he exclaimed, “Are these the groans of wounded men? Are they so many that my senses cannot take them in?--that my ear cannot distinguish them?” And raising himself fully upright and clasping his bony hands, he broke forth in tones that will never leave me. “O our God, in mercy to the poor creatures thou hast called into existence, send down thine angels either in love or wrath to stay this strife and bid it cease. Count the least of these cries as priceless jewels, each drop of blood as ruby gems, and let them buy the Freedom of the world. Clothe the feet of thy messengers with the speed of the lightning and bid them proclaim, through the sacrifices of a people, a people’s freedom, and, through the sufferings of a nation, a nation’s peace.” And there, under the guns of Richmond, amid the groans of the dying, in the darkling shadows of the smoky rafters of an old negro hut by the rude chimney where the dusky form of the bondman had crouched for years, on the ground trodden hard by the foot of the slave, I knelt beside that rough couch of boards and sobbed “Amen” to the patriot prayer that rose above me. * * * * *