Remember, if you please, that I had not heard a single word from home for over eight months. I did not, of course, know that all were well. I almost dreaded to hear first that some one dear to me had died during my long absence. I had sent some communications through the blockade from Richmond, but this had been some time before I left East Tennessee.
Of course, no replies to these could be received by me. Now, if the reader will put himself in my own, or my father's place, each at the end of a wire five hundred miles long, and try to imagine, if he can, the agony of suspense and fear that hung over me at that hour, he will realize, in part, my feelings. My nerves were at such a tension that, figuratively speaking, they were strung out as long as that wire, that reached over miles of mountain and plain to my Pennsylvania home. With my own hand trembling on the telegraph key I sent my own message, as follows:
"To father: I am here safe; are all well at home?"
TO FATHER: "I AM SAFE; ARE ALL WELL AT HOME?"
While waiting for the answer, which I knew must come soon, the moments seemed hours of suspense, while I tried to entertain my friends who were about me with a brief sketch of my adventurers, one of the operators took from the wires and handed me the reply, which I had failed to catch with my own ear while engaged in the talk. He read aloud the exact words of a bona fide message:
"I had little hopes of ever seeing you again. Come straight home. Your uncle A—— is dead. All the rest well.—Father."
That was all. It was enough. All were well at home. The uncle who had died in my absence was the one relative I had last visited on the day I heard of the battle of Bull Run. I would like here to tender a tribute to my father, but I feel that I am not competent to do the subject justice.
He still lives, an old patriarch, and will read these notes and for the first time fully understand the entire story of his wayward boy's adventures. My father was the one true constant friend of my checkered career, and to him and his untiring interest in my behalf I owe not only the preservation of my life, but what little I have attained in this world. I can sincerely thank God, as Beecher says, "That I was born of parents who gave me a sound constitution and a noble example, and can never pay back what I got from my parents. If I were able to raise a monument of gold higher than heaven, it would be no expression of the debt of gratitude which I owe them, for that which they unceasingly gave by the heritage of their body and the heritage of their souls to me."