A non-combatant minister of the gospel, having removed his invalid wife to a friend’s house less exposed to the flying shells, was seeking the same refuge for his infant child. As he walked, he met a brother minister, who had just taken part in the fight. The contrast, one bearing in his arms a musket and the other a child, was almost comical, and provoked a smile from the Quaker-like professional. He repressed it in presence of the grief he quickly encountered, as he met the wounded Captain’s wife and children. “O, Mr. ----,” she cried aloud, throwing her arms aloft into the unsympathizing air, “they have killed my husband! Come and see him!” This he did, and administered such consolation as our holy religion affords for sufferers. The dying young man was a sincere Christian believer. It was noted that only the Sunday evening before, with his family around him at home in the country, he had sung, with a heavenward aspiration of spirit, the grand old hymn, on whose winged words of divine promise and human faith many a devout heart has often risen into the Christian empyrean: “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord.” As his life ebbed fast away, his right hand now and then pressed that of the kneeling minister, in sympathy with the supplications offered to God. Soon the end came, and his dying breath went forth in prayer. Among his petitions to the King invisible, was one of “forgiveness to those who killed him.” No doubt he meant the enemies with whom he did battle that morning; but were there not others, positively, although remotely in time, accountable for his death? Who inaugurated that bloody war--whether it were rightly named civil or infernal? Did it come down from the sky above or leap up from the deep beneath, fully matured, as Minerva sprung forth from the head of Jupiter, in complete armor, with lifted spear and clashing weapons? Or was there some gigantic national wrong against humanity, that clamored for righteous adjustment, and would not sleep until it found redress? Was it begotten of enthusiastic philanthropy? Or of an unholy love of lordship? Of zeal for freedom and hate of oppression? Or of ambition to cut the Nation in two and create one with slavery for its corner-stone? Was it evolved from the heart and brain of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips? Or from those of Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs? Did the first gun fired on Fort Sumter, whose echoes went sounding through the land and sent the patriotic pulses of the people bounding to the quickstep of marching battalions, begin the biggest strife the world has known? Or were its seeds sown in earlier decades, when men, women and children of barbaric Africa, cruelly crowded in slave-ships, were freely imported to American Colonies and States, to be forever an inherited “bone of contention?”