A slight illness, aggravated by the fatigue of the day, induced me to accept the urgent request of a former acquaintance to spend the night with him upon the mountain.  During the evening, I chanced to show him the bullet, saying I thought myself quite fortunate in finding it.

“Oh,” said he, “that’s nothing.  A colored woman after the battle gathered and sold so many that she was able to purchase a cow with the money, and now that cow supports her family.”

I left Chattanooga the nest morning, and thought no more of the incident for a dozen years.  A short time since, however, I was spending the night in a small village in one of the mountain towns of Tennessee.  At nightfall, looking out from my hotel, I observed a company of colored people ambling along towards a low wooden meeting-house, and time hanging heavily on my hands, I decided to join the dusky worshipers.  I slipped in, therefore, when the meeting was a little under way, and allowed myself to be ushered up to the front seat, directly under the eye of an intelligent looking young man who proved to be the preacher for the occasion.  After a few opening services, which embraced the usual variety in ordinary churches, the minister took for his text the passage, “Ask, and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

“Now,” said he, when he had gotten on well with his introduction, “you must not believe you will surely receive precisely the thing you ask for in just the way you might like it.  Let me give you an illustration from my personal experience.  When a little boy, I lived with my mother on the southern slope of Lookout Mountain, and remember well the day that Gen. Hooker fought his great battle up there and how he and his soldiers marched bravely away.  For a long time the children and the grown people searched the battle-fields over, day after day, hoping to find things of value.  My mother made it her business to hunt for bullets, and at length the number she gathered herself and took from us boys was so great that she was able to purchase a cow with the money they brought.

“A benevolent gentleman living in New York at this time soon after secured the Government buildings on the top of the mountain that had been used for the sick soldiers, and fitted them up nicely for Northern teachers, who opened a boarding-school for white students.  I took milk to the institution from our cow, every morning, and how I wished that I might gain admittance to the school and procure an education!  One day I heard the scholars reciting in concert, ’Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.’  It came over me most powerfully and I repeated it again and again.  I said it to my mother, and inquired of her what it meant, and why it impressed me so, and who it was that said it.

“She replied, ’I dunno.  I reckon I’se heard dem words afore.  ’Pears like dey was spoke by the bressed Lord.’