The Oath of Allegiance

IT was the time of great purposes and small hopes; it was the time of grand deeds and dark dreams ; it was the time of glory and madness, of love and despair ; it was the time of the greatest motives and the noblest achievement, the truest praying and the bitterest suffering, that our land and our day have known.

The story which I have to tell, in far as it is a story at all, is a tale of the war, and therefore not in the fashion. It is in such important particulars true that it may ask a respectful hearing, since, in the matter of which I have to speak, it will be found that the fact rather than the way of putting the fact is the source of interest.

It was the summer of the year 1862, in the New England university town which let us call Bonn upon these pages. The year and the term were at their bloom; the elms were in rich leaf, and stood stately, like unconscious pagan divinities, august, in groups and ranks upon the college greens. The paths were weeded and clean. The grass was long and luxuriant; for this was before it was thought necessary to shave one’s lawn to fighting - cut. The June air melted delicately against the cheek. The proper cultivated flowers grew in the proper places, as such things do in well-directed towns. The white Persian lilac was blossom in the sedate gardens of the faculty. The well-trimmed honeysuckle clambered over the well-painted porch. The June lilies, in rows, stood decorously dying on the edges of the graveled paths. No one ever did anything indecorously in Bonn, — except, of course, the boys.

One of the boys had been dangerously near an indecorum in one of those highly cultivated gardens on the June day of which we speak. It had been a merry day, full of sun and winds and spices, full of the essences of growth and blossom and of reaching on to that larger life which precedes a glowing death; and the sturdy boy felt it, as he ought to, restlessly ; not as the serene elms did, and the white lilac. The elms always seemed to him to belong to the faculty.

As he sat in the shade of the particular elm that overhung the southeast corner of Professor Thornell’s garden, on the rustic seat (of iron, painted, not at all rusty) against the high stone wall, the arms of the tree swooped over him vigilantly, and gave him an uneasy sense as of one who would be requested to stay after that recitation if he forgot himself. Nature herself always seemed, in Bonn, to be appointed by the trustees.

His companion on the painted rustic seat did not say “swooped.” She said “ swept,” — the branches swept. She was the only daughter of Professor Thornell.

The young man, it was easy to see at a glance, was of the sort known in college circles as the popular fellow. This may mean almost anything; it sometimesQ means the best of things, as perhaps in this instance. He had a happy, hearty face. His eye was as direct as a noon sunbeam, and at times as bright; at others, it withdrew, like the eyes of a much older man, into a subdued cloud, blue, or gray, or violet, or one knew not what, He had bright brown hair, curly, and beneath the boyish mustache the cut of a firm, rather full, but remarkably delicate mouth was agreeably visible. He had the complexion and hands of carefully reared but athletic boys. He did not look as if he had ever done a stroke of work in his life outside of a campus or a schoolroom. One smiled on glancing from his cheek, ruddy and fair as a girl’s, to his palms, gnarled with the knocks of baseball, and his iron wrists. He had a round, Greek head, well set upon his shoulders. Seen for the first time in a crowd, an experienced teacher would have said of him, “ There goes a promise, — a well-born, well-balanced promise.”

The girl beside him was a trifle older than he, by the shade of a year, perhaps. At their age each camel’s-hair stroke of the brush of time tells. This little circumstance added dignity to her carriage and appearance. She hardly needed it. To some of the students she would have been more charming with a touch less of stateliness, but Harold Grand liked her the better for it. Deep in his young heart he was proud of the fact that the fellows used to say that you could not get near her with a ten-foot pole. This ancient and obvious figure of speech was the final college tribute to the distance, the modesty, and the sweet haughtiness of womanhood. Young Grand rated it accordingly.

In the pleasant, delicate fashion with which our best young people conduct such comradeships they had been friends for a long time, as university time goes, since junior year; and he was about to graduate. They talked friendship, as young folks do. Of love they had never spoken.

We speak of language as if it depended upon the lips to utter. What does the heart say, and what the turn of the head, the touch of the hand, the fall of the foot, or the mood of the eyes ? He sat looking at her that day steadfastly, with the bright, fearless, masculine gaze before which her own drooped. She leaned against the painted seat, and stirred uneasily. "Will you have the rest of the song ? ” she said. She reached around without turning her head, and lifted her guitar from the grass to her lap. Miriam did not play the piano, like the other girls. To please her father she had accomplished herself in the use of this oldfashioned instrument, her mother’s guitar. She played for Harold now and then because he liked it. Little dashes of light from the elm branches overhead flecked her sensitive face. She was not a beautiful girl, but she had the prophecy of a noble face.

She wore the “ spring-and-fall dress” of a well-regulated professor’s daughter, who must always appear as pretty as possible on the least possible sum of money. The dress was gray, trimmed with dark blue. Her eyes played between the two colors. She wore a drapery sleeve, in the fashion of the day, with a wide, full white undersleeve finished with a narrow linen cuff; a linen collar bound her throat: both were fastened by plain gold studs. Her hands, like her playing, were different from the other girls’, for she wore no rings.

Young Grand was quite familiar with the details of this severe little costume, for it was not new this spring. It seemed to him a kind of celestial uniform created for her, but he had never said so. She mourned sometimes that she could not "dress ” when Harold called. She would have liked to put on a new gown every time he came to see her, and so be a new girl on each occasion ; but she had never said that, either. She did not feel so when the other boys called. Now, when Tom Seyd came it was quite different.

“ Yes, play to me, please,” said Harold Grand.

She struck a few notes, and stopped.

“ I can’t! ” she pleaded.

“ Why not ? ”

“ It’s because — it’s the way — it’s the way you look at me.”

He did not look at her any the less for this. She began to tremble, and her cheek blazed. Then he took a swift, manly pity upon her, and folded his arms and turned his head, staring at the stone wall and the elm-tree. He had never touched her in his life; beyond the conventional grasp of meeting and parting, his had never met her hand. He would as soon have dared to touch the Ludovisi Juno. But now his moment of weakness overtook him, as it overtakes most of us at some unexpected time. His fingers strolled to the edge of her gray dress; his arms ached to take her, so he folded them, like the young gentleman that he was, and nodded at the faculty elms as who should say, “ No, sir ! You don’t keep me after this recitation ! ” And Miriam began to sing.

Thus ran the scene of their simple courtship ; so plain and pure and young, one might say so primitive, that it seems almost too slender to reset, in these days when our very boys and girls coquet with the audacity and the complexity of men and women of the world. And that was all.

Call the memory on wings through the upper air, move the sympathy gently, and summon the imagination softly, and, possibly, then one may understand what one has forgotten or what one never understood. We keep ourselves supplied with superior, slighting phrases for the loves of boys and girls. It would become us to preserve our respect for, and our comprehension of, experiences which may be the tenderest and the truest of life.

And Miriam, under the elm-tree in her father’s garden, to her mother’s guitar, began to sing : —

She had a sweet, not a strong voice; and she sang as the young and the happy do. Harold Grand unfolded his arms. He became curiously aware of the pressure of his mother’s ring upon his finger. His eyes dropped from the elm to the white lilac; then they strayed to the drooping yellow lilies. The end of the long blue ribbon at her throat blew in the warm air against his wrist. He restrained it softly with his hand.

“ Go on,” he whispered ; for the girl had stopped.

sang Miriam, —

Her voice fell and ceased ; her ringless hands strayed over the strings of the old-fashioned instrument; she looked as if she had come out of a picture of the date of her mother’s youth. He watched her profile, with the braid of brown hair low in the neck, and the silver arrow piercing the coil above. The air began to cool a little in the hot garden. The bees whispered sleepily to the honeysuckle, disdaining the lilies, which had left their prime behind them. The afternoon sank.

“ Yet I like them,” said Miriam abruptly. “ I love those yellow lilies as long as they live, and when they die I love their ghosts. You never could think how they look by moonlight! I come out sometimes and walk up and down that path, quite late, to see them.”

“ You are changing the subject,” suggested the young man, but not with the self-possession that the little sally might have implied.

“ I have forgotten what the subject was,” said Miriam mischievously : for she had recovered herself the first of the two, as women do.

“ Oh — it is one as old as — older than we are — older than earth is, for aught I know,” the hoy said, passing his hand over his eyes. “ And I was going to say — to try to say ” —

Then the color burned the girl’s tine, reserved face from brow to throat. Then she caught her breath, and thrust out her hand as if she would have interrupted him. But she was spared her pretty maiden trouble.

Professor Thornell, accompanied by Professor Seyd (of the Scientific Chair), came down the garden walk. The two learned men walked ponderously between the rows of yellow lilies. They discussed the unfortunate friction at the last faculty meeting, and the probable course of pedagogical harmony at the meeting of that night. They were absorbed in these great themes. They looked vaguely at the young people on the painted iron settee. Professor Thornell smiled affectionately at his daughter and passed on, and forgot her at once.

It no more occurred to him that she and young Grand needed matronizing than that he should offer a chaperon to the busts of Apollo and Minerva in the college library. But when he had paced to the garden fence and back again, he stopped confusedly to say : —

“ My dear, I forgot — we are so driven with Commencement business — I forgot entirely that I had a message from your mother. She said I was to tell you — How unfortunate ! It was some minor domestic errand. Professor Seyd, what was it that Mrs. Thornell desired to have done ? ” pleaded the Professor of English Letters helplessly.

“ She desired a salad prepared for supper,” prompted the Professor of Science accurately. “ She desired, if you found Miss Miriam, that she should prepare a potato salad, with the addition of beets.”

Miriam rose at once. She gathered her guitar to her lap, and put on her straw hat. The two heavily instructed gentlemen continued their walk up and down the garden paths ; they discussed faculty matters, supperless and inaccessible, till eight o’clock that night.

The two young people passed on up to the house between the rows of dying lilies. They passed in silence, and sejmrated at the front door. The winged moment had fled. The sacred embarrassment of youth and love fell between them. For his life he could not then have finished his sentence. Nor could she, for hers, have helped him.

Now, the scientific professor, having an unscientific and emotional wife, had gone home, as her nerves exacted, to report. himself to her; thus he came late to the faculty meeting at the President’s house. Professor Thornell was annoyed.

“"We need all hands to-night,” he remarked. with the natural acerbity of a colleague.

Professor Seyd turned upon him a stiffened face ; it showed an unprecedented lack of color ; he was usually a red, comfortable man.

“ Have you seen the bulletins ? ” he demanded shortly. “ I am just from the telegraph office. We have been defeated again. Our losses are said to be ” — He began slowly to repeat, with his own frightful, statistical accuracy, the rumors — for there were only rumors yet to turn to — of the evening : Killed — Wounded — Missing — a fearful table.

The faculty sprang from their chairs and gathered round him, while with pallid lips he recounted the horrors of one of the worst days of the Peninsular campaign. The gray-haired President uttered a fierce, unscholarly exclamation, and automatically reached for his hat and cane. He acknowledged afterwards that it came into his head to go down town and enlist. For once in the history of Bonn University, Commencement was obliterated from the consciousness of her professors. The quarrel in the faculty was forgotten. The Professor of English Letters and the Professor of Science shook hands with the Mathematical Chair, their chronic foe.

“ The boys are beside themselves. They are unmanageable,” said Professor Seyd, with evident agitation. “ The whole University is in the streets. It is rumored that President Lincoln will issue a call for more troops. Five sixths of the senior class will enlist, if he does, and — God bless them ! — I would if I were they ! ”

He had a boy of his own in the senior class. It never had occurred to him that Tom could go.

“ Hush ! ” said Professor Thornell, with a break in his voice. “ Hear them, now. Listen! ”

Far down the street and wide over the college green the boys were singing; not wildly, but with a restrained pathos and solemnity, strange to their young lips : —

The tramping of their steps fell on the smooth, hard streets like the marching of an army corps. It approached the President’s house with measured tread.

“ The college militia is out,” observed Professor Thornell. “ They have done some good drilling, our boys.”

The faculty answered with proud eyes. These elderly men flung open the doors and windows, and rushed out like boys to meet the other boys as they poured upon the lawn, calling for speeches. In the centre of the crowd stood the college company, drawn up rank and file. The lights blazed upon their grave young faces. They saluted their instructors solemnly. Their Captain advanced from the line. He stood apart, with his curly head bared, while he conferred with the President. Nobody had such a manner as young Grand. He had heroic beauty that night. His eyes were elate and remote. He seemed to see no person present.

But Tom Seyd, back in the ranks, looked straight at his old father.

In the house of the Professor of English Literature, half a mile down the surging street, a girl opened the window of her room, and put aside the white dimity curtain, to lean over the sill and listen. The drumbeats tapped the hot night air, and grew above the ceasing and the silenced college songs.

“ It is the boys out drilling,” thought Miriam. “ They are having a good time. I wish I could see . . . He looks so handsome in that uniform ! And father will make them a speech.”

Commencement at Bonn was but a broken drama, that agitated year. The ceremonials began, after their usual fashion at that time and in that college, upon one of the closing days of June. But on the 1st of July came the yet wellremembered call of the President of the United States for three hundred thousand more recruits.

He who lived the war through in a university town knows what patriotism meant, in those large days, to our educated men. Where was found the purer motive, the braver, nobler act ? What class of heroes in our smitten land offered to their country life more high and precious, or death so calm, intelligent, and grand ?

The scientific professor, with his habitual accuracy, had foretold the turn of affairs in the college quite precisely. In fact, five sixths of the senior class, in one wild burst of sacred rage, offered themselves for enlistment; and a large number were accepted. The boys exchanged their diplomas for their muskets. The professors held an impromptu faculty meeting on the platform of the exhibition hall, where, for the first time in the history of the old University, Commencement etiquette was hurled to the winds. The short - breathed trustees clambered up by the winding stairs into the anteroom, and these venerable men, with streaming eyes, signed the sheepskins, which they dispatched after the young heroes who had flung scholastic honor and peace and safety down at the scorching feet of that great July. And so the senior class of Bonn was nobly and irregularly graduated, and marched away.

In those fiery days, personal tragedy was but the little tongue of flame in the great conflagration. Men swept to their doom with ecstasy, and the firm-set lip trembled only when it gave the last kiss at home. Women, old in trouble, took upon their souls one anguish more, and uttered no complaint. Girls — sometimes I think that the girls had the hardest of it. Nobody thought so then, or perhaps believes it now. Who has ever measured the depths of the possibility of suffering in a girl’s heart ? She is so unused to life, so young and trustful of joy! She expects to he happy ; she has endured so little, she has hoped so much ; she tastes of tenderness and anticipates delight; she prays to God, she adores her lover, and believes in her fair fate. Why do the gray-haired women weep ? What is this prattle about trouble that she overhears ? By love she is incredulous of sorrow. By youth she overcomes the world.

Miriam, in her father’s house, sat dumb. In an hour, in a moment, it seemed, her catastrophe had come upon her. At the call for three hundred thousand more to fight the war out, lie had given himself, without doubt or delay. The Captain of the college militia had dashed into service without a commission, and came to her in his private’s uniform to say good-by.

In the whirlwind of those few wild days, leisure was the inaccessible thing, and privacy impossible. He came: it was a matter of moments. He was allowed a day in which to visit his home in New York ; for he had a mother and a sister. They had rights. Miriam had none. Who thought to leave the boy and girl alone together ? It did not occur to the unimaginative mother of an unengaged daughter to force the situation. or to create a difficult tete-a-tete in a house full of company long ago bidden for the spoiled Commencement, and staying over out of sheer excitement, to discuss the national emergency. It did not occur to the Professor of English Literature, who bustled in to bid his favorite student Godspeed, and to tell him that the University was proud of him. Babbling guests overflowed the parlors and library, the piazza, and the hall itself.

It was raining, and the garden was uninhabitable. The two young people, in the pitiable publicity which, forced at the crisis of fate, has separated thousands of approaching lives, said farewell. They looked miserably into each other’s eyes. Miriam heard an old clergyman in the hack parlor doorway talking about Arianism. A professor’s wife in the hall was cackling to another about the lint that she had picked for the soldiers. Dully the girl was conscious that her father — dear old stupid father ! — stood behind her. He was telling Harold for the third time that Bonn was proud of her noble boys. Before everybody she and Harold clasped hands. Before all those people she saw him move across the threshold of her father’s door, and step out into the summer storm and leave her. She Stirred into the vestibule, and stood beside him. In the garden the elm-trees were tossing about: a wet gust blew against her thin dress, — she wore a white organdie muslin with a little vari-colored pattern ; she shivered in the wind. From the stone wall drops were dripping on the iron seat. The yellow lilies lay over in the gravel, beaten by the storm.

“ I shall write to you,” he said,”I shall write.” He wrung her cold hand. She gave one look at his bowed face ; its expression awed her. She saw him put on his military cap. He turned and lifted it when he had reached the sidewalk. All the people stood about, but he looked only at her.

Miriam made her way back through the Commencement company. She felt her way upstairs by the banisters, for she seemed to be going blind. She held the muscles of her face stiff. Everybody could see her. She was only an unbetrothed girl, — she had no right to cry.

She got up to her room, thrust open her blinds, and leaned against the dimity curtain. But she could not see him. She thought she heard the tread of his ringing feet as they turned the corner.

She tottered to her white bed, and flung herself face down. And the people babbled in the parlors. But the old clergyman talked no more of Arianism. Word had just been sent him by telegraph from New Hampshire that his only son had enlisted for the war. By and by a maid knocked at Miriam’s door ; for young Mr. Seyd had come ; he would go to camp in the morning.

“ Oh, I can’t — I can’t ! ” moaned Miriam. “ Maggie . . . manage somehow ! ” She held her arms up to the other girl, her mother’s servant, the only other young thing in the house.

“ An’ that you sha’n’t! ” cried Maggie. She went up to Miriam, and out of her warm Irish heart, and on the passion of the solemn time that washed out all little human laws and lines, she kissed her young mistress, for the first and only time in her life, and went away without a question or a word.

Confused phrases ran through Miriam’s burning brain : “ Father and mother hast thou put far from me — in this hour,” Only the Irish maid understood.

From Washington he wrote to her. It was a short note, dashed off in pencil upon the journey, on a leaf torn from his diary. Already the solemn strangeness of his sacrifice had moved between them. In a day the college boy had become a man. He had other things to think of besides herself. He wrote of the national emergency; lie spoke passionately of the Flag and its perils ; he said that he hoped to go soon into action. lie should write her a letter before then.

“ This is all I can manage now. I write on my cap, in the cars. The boys are chattering about me. They are all in excellent courage. Some of them are talking about my being made Lieutenant. It was too bad all those old coves were round when I came to say good-by. I wanted to see you alone.

“ E shall write again, when I can collect my thoughts as I wish to. I shall certainly write before 1 go on the field. I have a good deal to say to you, and I want to hear from you before we go under fire.”

And this was all. From the young soldier no other message came to her. The poor girl tied her thick winter veil across her limited eyes, and shadowed the post office, anticipating all the mails before her father got them. She knew that the regiment had been ordered to the front, — everybody knew that. She knew no more than everybody knew. There was no letter.

Days writhed by, as such days do; weeks, — how many she could not have told. She lived like a creature under vivisection, who understands what the men of science are saying around the torture-table. Her mother had begun to notice how she looked, and the Irish girl watched her furtively.

The professor’s wife came slowly upstairs oue burning midsummer day, and pushed open the unlatched door of her daughter’s room. The blinds were closed, and Miriam sat in the green darkness by the window, in the great old-fashioned chair, cushioned in white, that she had gone to sleep in when she was so little that her feet could not touch the floor. Her face was turned toward the lines of fiery light that blazed between the slats of the blinds ; her head lay back against the chair.

Mrs. Thorn ell stopped in the middle of the room. Her countenance was agitated.

“ My dear,” she said, with embarrassment, “ Professor Seyd has news from Tom. There has been — I think they called it a skirmish — it was not a great battle—but Tom was wounded; not dangerously, I think. They have gone on to bring him home.”

Miriam opened her eyes ; she did not turn her head, nor did she find it necessary to speak.

“And — there were others hurt — and — Harold Grand.”

“You need not try, mother,” said Miriam distinctly. “ Maggie told me. She brought me the paper.”

“ He died nobly ! ” faltered the mother. “ And ... it was instantaneous, my dear. He did not suffer — like some.”

“ Thank you, mother,” said Miriam. She turned her head away from the hot window, and shut her eyes. Her head lay heavily against the high white chair. Helpless and distanced, her mother stood uncertain. Then she stole away and went downstairs.

Miriam crawled across the room, and locked her door. After a little she went back and unlocked it. She had no right, she remembered, even to turn the key upon her unnamed, unauthorized, unmaidenly anguish. She stood alone in her room, and lifted her arms up once to the invisible sky. In her face was one of the challenges that God himself must find it hard to answer.

“ How do women hear their lives ? ” she said.

God who sends them only knows. She bore hers as other women do who are smitten as she was. Perhaps, on the whole, she bore it better than many, lint she was very young.

The letter did not come. At first she looked for it a little, with the defiant hopefulness of youth. It was a long time before she gave up haunting the post office. She went in the morning sometimes, hut in the evening always. Her hand shook so that the clerk noticed it, when she took her father’s seven o clock mail. In time the reaction struck, and a sick horror of the whole thing came upon her. Then she went no more. "I shall write to you,” he had said. But he had not written.

They brought him to his mother’s home in New York ; and although it was vacation, a delegation from the college went on to his military funeral. His mother and sister, in their black dresses, tied the flowers about his sword, and the scattered students wore crape upon their arms for thirty days.

Miriam wore her gray dress with the blue trimming, and the muslin with the bright spot. She would have gone on her knees for the shelter of a black veil in which to hide her face from the eyes of people. But Miriam had no right to the sacred insignia of mourning, in those days thought as necessary to the decency of grief as tears. She pinned on her bright ribbons, and trimmed her hat with flowers ; she went to merrymakings with the young people, as she must. She laughed when she had to. She did not cry : that was the worst thing about it. She had never cried since Maggie brought her the paper with the list.

After a while she stopped wearing those two dresses, the gray, and the organdie that she had on the last time she saw him. She folded them and put them away, for she could not hear to look at them. Only girls will understand this.

On the guitar, now, she did not play. She could not hide that; it must stand in the parlor, in its usual corner. But she put away the sheet of music on which were penciled the notes of the old English song that she had sung to him :

But he had not found out the way.

So she took up her part in the long tragedy of life, and supported it, as her nature was. Her pride was as fierce as her love ; the twain seized her like fighting Titans, and tare her. She stood her ground between them, as strong youth does ; and one day she opened her sad blue eyes and noticed that she was young no more.

It took the most ardent lover she had ever had to call her attention to this unobtrusive fact; which was the last thing that he had intended to do. It was a June day. in the year 1877, when Tom Seyd spoke to her, — fifteen years after he and Harold had enlisted, iom had loved her all his life ; he had never loved any girl but Miriam. She was a woman now, thirty-five years old, and he a man.

Since young Seyd had become his father’s assistant professor he had been an absorbed, ambitious man ; but he had forced the leisure to see her so often that she had become in a measure dependent upon his evident tenderness, as he meant she should. Indeed, she would have missed it. She cherished beautiful, preposterous ideals of friendship, as lonely women do ; dreaming of noble devotion which asked for nothing in return. She blessed Tom Seyd in her desolate heart that he had never “made love ” to her, and never would.

So when he told her, that day, without prelude or apology, that he had always loved her, she experienced a suffocating, moral shock.

“ It won’t do,” said Seyd firmly. “It won’t go, all this about friendship. I do not feel the need of a friend. It is a wife I want. I love you.”

“ But not in that way ! ” protested Miriam.

“ I love you in just that way,” said the young man, as quietly as if he had been analyzing a crystal before the sophomore class. “ I do not love you in any other, and I never have.”

“ Then you have deceived me ! ” cried Miriam, growing as pale as a pear blossom.

“ I undeceive you. then,” said Seyd.

“ I love you, and I believe that I could make you happy, if you would let me try.”

He stated his case with something of his father’s scientific manner ; dryly, so far as the words went. But his voice shook, and his hand. And into his gray eyes, that she had always thought so commonplace and “ worthy,” she could not look: for they beat and blinded hers. She felt in them that which the most lovable of women does not often see, — the loyalty of an unselfish, unswerving, lifelong love.

She knew good women who would have given their lives — it was in her heart to sav, would have sold their souls — for love like this.

And for what should she fling it from her ? For the memory of a memory, the shadow of a wraith, the echo of the voice of an unseen spirit flitting through a dark and ghostly realm ; for oath of allegiance to a claim that had never existed ; for love of a boy who had not loved her enough to find a way to tell her so before he died.

“ I have waited fifteen years,” said Tom Seyd patiently. “ I have not intruded on you, have I ? I have not been stupid about it, I think. I understood how it was. But I have loved you all the same and all the while.”

Her white cheek burned. A sacred shame, even after all these years, covered her with womanly confusion. She remembered how she used to be called the proudest girl in the college town. Did he taunt her with her pitiable love ? “ Let me go ! ” she gasped.

“ No, no,” he pleaded. “ Sit down here beside me — for a minute. Listen to me — here.”

Then she lifted her eyes, and behold, he had led her to the painted iron seat against the garden wall. The elm-tree rose above it, venerable and calm. The white lilac was in blossom; the bees of Bonn sang to the honeysuckle ; in rows the yellow lilies were beginning to (lie.

But Miriam stood rigid and tall. She looked through him and on, beyond him ; as if he had been the ghost, and that dead boy the living man.

“If I ever listen to you,” she breathed, “ it will not be here.”

And with this she tied and left him. But his heart leaped with hope and madness; and he went down to his father’s laboratory to try a difficult experiment, in the delirium that a man knows but once in life.

Miriam went u]) the garden walk and into the house. She felt her way by the branches of trees and shrubs ; for she had, for the second time in her life, that feeling of one about to be stricken blind. The house was still, that night, and empty. The professor was at faculty meeting, and the professor’s wife at a Commencement tea. It was one of the rare occasions when a. grown daughter in her father’s home may command the freedom and solitude which become so precious as we grow old.

Maggie brought the tea-urn, but said nothing. Maggie had grown old and sober. There was a grocer’s boy who never came back from Antietam. But Maggie wore his ring, and shared her quarter’s wages wTith his mother. Miriam looked with a fierce envy, sometimes, at the Irish girl.

It came on to be a moonlit night, sultry and sweet. Miriam went to her own room, but could not stay there. She caught up her straw hat and wandered out. House, garden, home, seemed too small to hold her. She struck into the street, and began to walk. Automatically her feet turned toward the post office, as they used to do fifteen years before, when the seven o’clock mail came in. The boys were singing on the campus. All the college town was bright and alive.

“ I am the only ghost in it,” thought Miriam.

Her father’s mail had been taken, and she came wearily back. Into the dark parlor the moonlight fell through the long muslin curtains. The guitar stood in the corner. For the first time for fifteen years she took it in her trembling hands. There was no one to listen. She played and sang : —

With the wail of the worse than dead her voice faltered through the empty house. She laid her cheek against the old guitar and patted it.

“ Oh. good-by, dear ! ” she said.

The college boys on the campus began to sing those cruel army songs, fifteen years old. What right had they, these fortunate, light-hearted sons of pampered peace, to torture people who lived the war through ?

Impossible ! Impossible to think about Tom Seyd till the boys had finished singing ! And it was imperative to think about Tom Seyd. Miriam put down the guitar, and ran upstairs with her fingers in her ears. If she should listen to this live man, dead ones must be kept still. She cried out as if the boys of Bonn could hear her, or would regard her if they did, “Oh. boys, stop that singing! . . . It murders us. — women grown so old that you have forgotten we ’re alive! ”

When the knock came at her door, she did not hear it at the first ; for she was moving through those spaces where sound is not, nor time, nor human interruption. She was lying on her bed, with her face buried in the pillows. The moonlight built a bridge straight through the middle of the dark room. She got up and crossed it. to come to Maggie, who stood upon the threshold.

“ Oh. Miss Miriam ! ” said Maggie, with broken breath. “ For the love of God. corne here’ Come out to me lamp and see . . . for I darsen’t go into the dark to give it yez ! ”

In the hall, a hand-lamp was set upon the little table. Maggie tottered beside it; the cheek of the Irish girl was whiter than the paper in her shaking hand.

For she held a letter, stained and marred and time-discolored, bearing the forgotten red postage stamp of the denomination of the war ; a letter as old as . . . O God! as old as anguish! For when Miriam dashed it up against the light, the house rang with such a cry as it would have broken his heart, in heaven, to hear.

“It is his ghost,” sobbed Maggie.

“ His ghost has taken his pen in hand to comfort yez ! ”

But when has it been recorded in the heavens above, or on the earth beneath, that a ghost could write as he had written ? Living was the hand and living was the love that penned those worn and faded pages.

With a clang she locked, and doublelocked, and triple-locked the door, to read this message from beyond the grave. She had the right now. . . . She could keep the whole world off. She and her sacred joy and her holy grief were sanctified at last. He loved her. He had loved her then and always. In a few manly, ardent words, written upon the march, he had poured his heart out. and placed it in her keeping. He had meant to write differently, he said. He had waited to find a better time. But. war made no way for love. Would she listen to this poor love-letter ? Spoiled, he said, as so much else was spoiled, — the lives of men and the happiness of women, — by the accidents of war.

“ I shall give it to one of the boys who is on the sick list, and has a furlough,” he wrote, “ and be will get it mailed for me, — in Washington, I hope, or even in New York. I think it will go more quickly so, and surer. Our mails are irregular, you know, and uncertain. Write to me, if there is time. We may be called into action any hour. I hope I sha’n’t disgrace myself, for your sake. I think I shall behave better if I can get your answer,—eitliev way you put it. I have never dared believe you really love me. But if you do, or if you can. — enough, I mean, to be my wife some day, —I don’t think I could die if I knew that. I should come back all right. ‘ Love would find out the way,’ you used to sing — it seems fifty years ago ! I shall write my mother about you, if you give me the right, at once. She and my sister would want to see you. I send you that old ring of mother’s you used to see me wear. It is the best I can do. on the march. Wear it for me, dear, if you do love me, till I see your face again. For I am Your own, and only yours,

Till death and after it,

HAROLD GRAND.”

She read. She clasped the gray and tattered paper to her bosom and buried it there. She fell upon her knees, and lifted her streaming face to heaven. And then, for the first time in all those years, she broke into terrible sobs.

So much of this story of a letter as is true I tell; and for more I cannot vouch. What was the fate of the message for fifteen years withheld from the stricken girl ? Perhaps the soldier on the furlough died. Perhaps, at the time, his pockets were not searched. Was he some friendless fellow, for whose affairs nobody cared? Did the letter slip between the lining and the army blue? Did the uniform pass from hand to hand ? Perhaps it was cut. up some day for a veteran s son, and so the worn envelope slipped out, and some one said to one of the children, “There is an old army letter, sealed and stamped, and never sent. Run and mail it, my dear. We must not open it or keep it. It may be some poor girl has waited for it all these years. Whether in this way or in that way God’s mysterious finger traced the lines by which the dead boy’s declaration of love did force its way to her, who shall say ? I know no more than you, no more than she ; for I tell it only as it was told to me.

Only this I can append. When young Professor Seyd came to the house again, that evening, the Irish girl stood in the front door and barred the way.

“ It’s no use, Perfesser Tom,” said Maggie, ’an’ that I takes upon meself to say. There’s a dead man got ahead of yez. Me and you are nothin’, Mr. Tom, — nothin’ to her but just livin’ folks.”

Then Maggie told him what had happened. And Tom Seyd went back to his father’s laboratory without a word. In this he showed the discretion of his temperament, which accepts a fact, be it what it will and lead it where it may, without an idle protest.

On that great glad night, she had forgotten him as utterly as annihilation. The Irish girl was wise. He was nothing to Miriam but a living man.

The elm-tree in the garden could have taught him that; and the Persian lilac might have told him, £i It was not love she gave you.” But the yellow lilies kept awake to watch for her.

She came at midnight, when all her father’s house was still. She wore the old white muslin dress with the little colored pattern. She held her head like a bride, and trod like the Queen of Joy. Nor God nor man could say her nay, now. Proudly she took upon her soul the oath of allegiance which binds the living to the dead. — that ancient oath, so often taken, so often broken, and sometimes kept. She stopped beneath the elm, and stood beside the iron seat against the garden wall. The hot night, had grown cool and calm. The moonlight lay at the flood. There Miriam put his mother’s ring upon her marriage linger; and there she lifted from the earth to heaven the solemn face of the happiest woman in the land.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.