new the thrill and the comfort that the name carried.
Again and again her life was in danger--once at Antietam, when
stooping to give a drink of water to an injured boy, a bullet whizzed
between them. It ended the life of the poor lad, but only tore a hole
in Clara Barton's sleeve. And so, again and again, it seemed as if a
special Providence protected her from death or injury. At
Fredericksburg, when the dead, starving and wounded lay frozen on the
ground, and there was no effective organization for proper relief,
with swift, silent efficiency Clara Barton moved among them, having
the snow cleared away and under the banks finding famished, frozen
figures which were once men. She rushed to have an old chimney torn
down and built fire-blocks, over which she soon had kettles full of
coffee and gruel steaming.

As she was bending over a wounded rebel, he whispered to her: "Lady,
you have been kind to me ... every street of the city is covered by
our cannon. When your entire army has reached the other side of the
Rappahannock, they will find Fredericksburg only a slaughter-pen. Not
a regiment will escape. Do not go over, for you will go to certain
death."

She thanked him for the kindly warning and later told of the call that
came to her to go across the river, and what happened. She says:

"At ten o'clock of the battle day when the rebel fire was hottest, the
shells rolling down every street, and the bridge under the heavy
cannonade, a courier dashed over, and, rushing up the steps of the
house where I was, placed in my hand a crumpled, bloody piece of
paper, a request from the lion-hearted old surgeon on the opposite
shore, establishing his hospitals in the very jaws of death:

"'Come to me,' he wrote. 'Your place is here.'

"The faces of the rough men working at my side, which eight weeks before
had flushed with indignation at the thought of being controlled by a
woman, grew ashy white as they guessed the nature of the summons, ...
and they begged me to send them, but save myself. I could only allow
them to go with me if they chose, and in twenty minutes we were rocking
across the swaying bridge, the water hissing with shot on either side.

"Over into that city of death, its roofs riddled by shell, its every
church a crowded hospital, every street a battle-line, every hill a
rampart, every rock a fortress, and every stone wall a blazing line of
forts.

"Oh, what a day's work was that! How those long lines of blue