, rank on
rank, charged over the open acres, up to the very mouths of those
blazing guns, and how like grain before the sickle they fell and
melted away.

"An officer stepped to my side to assist me over the debris at the end
of the bridge. While our hands were raised in the act of stepping
down, a piece of an exploding shell hissed through between us, just
below our arms, carrying away a portion of both the skirts of his coat
and my dress, rolling along the ground a few rods from us like a
harmless pebble in the water. The next instant a solid shot thundered
over our heads, a noble steed bounded in the air and with his gallant
rider rolled in the dirt not thirty feet in the rear. Leaving the
kind-hearted officer, I passed on alone to the hospital. In less than
a half-hour he was brought to me--dead."

She was passing along a street in the heart of the city when she had
to step aside to let a regiment of infantry march by. At that moment
General Patrick saw her, and, thinking she was a frightened resident
of the city who had been left behind in the general exodus, leaned
from his saddle and said, reassuringly:

"You are alone and in great danger, madam. Do you want protection?"

With a rare smile, Miss Barton said, as she looked at the ranks of
soldiers, "Thank you, but I think I am the best-protected woman in the
United States."

The near-by soldiers caught her words and cried out:

"That's so! That's so!" and the cheer they gave was echoed by line
after line, until the sound of the shouting was like the cheers after
a great victory. Bending low with a courtly smile, the general said:

"I believe you are right, madam!" and galloped away.

"At the battles of Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam, during
the eight months' siege of Charleston, in the hospital at Fort Wagner,
with the army in front of Petersburg and in the Wilderness and the
hospitals about Richmond, there was no limit to the work Clara Barton
accomplished for the sick and dying, but among all her experiences
during those years of the war, the Battle of Fredericksburg was most
unspeakably awful to her. And yet afterward she saw clearly that it
was this defeat that gave birth to the Emancipation Proclamation.

"And the white May blossoms of '63 fell over the glad faces--the
swarthy brows, the toil-worn hands of four million liberated slaves.
'America,' writes Miss Barton, 'had freed a race.'"

As the war drew to an end, President Lincoln rec