e than a dream; he wondered what life would have
been to him if they had been spared. Then his school-days came up
before him; his journey to France with his grandfather; his studies at
St. Cyr; his return to America during the great war, his enlistment as
a private in the regular cavalry, his promotion to a lieutenancy three
days afterward, his service through the terrible campaign of the
Peninsula, his wounds at Gettysburg, and at last the grand review of
the veterans in front of the White House when the war was over.

But this swift and brilliant panorama did not long delay his musing
fancy. A dull smart like that of a healing wound drew his mind to a
succession of scenes on the frontier. He dwelt with that strange
fascination which belongs to the memory of hardships--and which we are
all too apt to mistake for regret--upon his life of toil and danger in
the wide desolation of the West. There he met, one horrible winter, the
sister-in-law of a brother captain, a tall, languid, ill-nourished girl
of mature years, with tender blue eyes and a taste for Byron. She had
no home and no relatives in the world except her sister, Mrs. Keefe,
whom she had followed into the wilderness. She was a heavy burden on
the scanty resources of poor Keefe, but he made her cordially welcome
like the hearty soldier that he was. She was the only unmarried white
woman within a hundred miles, and the mercury ranged from zero to -20
degrees all winter. In the spring, she and Farnham were married; he
seemed to have lost the sense of there being any other women in the
world, and he took her, as one instinctively takes to dinner the last
lady remaining in a drawing-room, without special orders. He had had
the consolation of reflecting that he made her perfectly proud and
happy every day of her life that was left. Before the autumn ended,
she died, on a forced march one day, when the air was glittering with
alkali, and the fierce sun seemed to wither the dismal plain like the
vengeance of heaven. Though Farnham was even then one of the richest
men in the army, so rigid are the rules imposed upon our service, by
the economy of an ignorant demagogy, that no transportation could be
had to supply this sick lady with the ordinary conveniences of life,
and she died in his arms, on the hot prairie, in the shade of an
overloaded baggage wagon. He mourned her with the passing grief one
gives to a comrade fallen on the field of honor. Often since he left
th