There were four rooms on the ground floor of the house, and two in the main building up-stairs, and two additional rooms which had been added, but were so situated that an accurate description would be hard to give, and perhaps harder to understand after giving.

The house faced nearly east, and had a porch up and down-stairs, and on the north side a gallery.  There were the usual out-houses, and a feature of the place was the spring, which was situated at the foot of the hill upon which the house stood.  Water was supplied from this spring by means of a ram-pump with pipes.  Around the spring was a growth of very fine walnut-and chestnut-trees, which made it a very cool retreat during the warm days of summer.  A large orchard of apples, plums, and peaches was immediately in the rear of the residence.  Between the farm and the road which led from Lynchburg to Amherst Court-House, a distance of about two miles, was a thick growth of woods, consisting principally of chestnut-trees.

“The whole face of the country consisted of hills and dales, and was rather rugged; the soil rather poor, probably having been exhausted by long cultivation.  The nearest house was fully a mile distant, that section of country being but sparsely settled.”

Their painful journey thitherward ended, just imagine what it must have been to these suffering men to arrive at such a haven of rest!—­a “refuge” indeed.  Think of the cool, breezy chambers, clean and white and fragrant, like home, of the tender ministry of that gentle woman, whose loving service was theirs to command, of the country food, of the cool, sparkling water from the spring under the oaks, held to fevered lips by ever-ready hands, while the favored patients drank at the same time draughts of sympathy from eyes whose kindly glances fell upon the humblest as upon their very own.  The excellence and faithfulness of the nursing is fully proved by the fact that while three or four hundred patients were sent to this blessed “Refuge,” no mortality occurred among the soldiers, the only death being that of a little son of Captain Laurence Nichols, who had fallen in battle at Gaines’s Mill, and whose widow found in this lovely, hospitable home a temporary resting-place for the body of her gallant husband, and shelter for herself and child, a lovely boy of three years, who was thence transferred to the arms of the Good Shepherd.  Sad, indeed, were the hearts of the little band of women gathered at the “Refuge.”

The trials of the bereaved wife and mother were indeed sore and hard to be borne, but she could go to the graves of her dead and there pray for faith to look upward, where she knew her treasures were safe for time and for eternity.  Under the same roof the wife of General Francis T. Nichols passed days and nights of agonizing suspense.  Her husband was wounded and a prisoner.  She knew he had suffered amputation of an arm, but could learn nothing more. Rumors were fearful enough to distress the