n in blood and
tears, and on the brows of a ransomed people God poured the chrism of a
new era, and they stood a race newly anointed with freedom.

CHAPTER XVI.

AFTER THE BATTLE.

Very sad and heart-rending were the scenes with which Iola came in
constant contact. Well may Christian men and women labor and pray for
the time when nations shall learn war no more; when, instead of bloody
conflicts, there shall be peaceful arbitration. The battle in which
Robert fought, after his last conversation with Captain Sybil, was one
of the decisive struggles of the closing conflict. The mills of doom and
fate had ground out a fearful grist of agony and death,

"And lives of men and souls of States
Were thrown like chaff beyond the gates."

Numbers were taken prisoners. Pale, young corpses strewed the earth;
manhood was stricken down in the flush of its energy and prime. The
ambulances brought in the wounded and dying. Captain Sybil laid down his
life on the altar of freedom. His prediction was fulfilled. Robert was
brought into the hospital, wounded, but not dangerously. Iola remembered
him as being the friend of Tom Anderson, and her heart was drawn
instinctively towards him. For awhile he was delirious, but her presence
had a soothing effect upon him. He sometimes imagined that she was his
mother, and he would tell her how he had missed her; and then at times
he would call her sister. Iola, tender and compassionate, humored his
fancies, and would sing to him in low, sweet tones some of the hymns
she had learned in her old home in Mississippi. One day she sang a few
verses of the hymn beginning with the words--

"Drooping souls no longer grieve,
Heaven is propitious;
If on Christ you do believe,
You will find Him precious."

"That," said he, looking earnestly into Iola's face, "was my mother's
hymn. I have not heard it for years. Where did you learn it?"

Iola gazed inquiringly upon the face of her patient, and saw, by his
clear gaze and the expression of his face, that his reason had returned.

"In my home, in Mississippi, from my own dear mother," was Iola's reply.

"Do you know where she learned it?" asked Robert.

"When she was a little girl she heard her mother sing it. Years after, a
Methodist preacher came to our house, sang this hymn, and left the book
behind him. My father was a Catholic, but my mother never went to any
church. I did not understand it then, b