s of acquaintanceship. The shame my calling
inspired me with made me reluctant to know those who, perhaps, when they
discovered me to be the spy, would have regarded me with aversion! Not
that in reality the odious epithet could, with any fairness, be applied
to me. My "secret agency" had not risen beyond the mere functions of
a messenger; and though at times I was intrusted with verbal
communications, they were delivered in confidence of my trustworthiness,
and not imparted in any reliance on my skill to improve them; but I
cannot stoop to apologize for a condition to which bitter necessity
reduced me, and which I clung to as offering the last remnant of hope
to find out those who, of all the world, were the only ones who bore me
affection.

I have already said that this hope was now fast dying out; repeated
disappointment had all but extinguished it; and it was only when
the name "Reichenau" had again stirred its almost cold embers that I
determined on this last chance ere I abandoned my career forever.

CHAPTER XXXV. "DISCOVERIES"

Only ye who have felt what it is after long years of absence, after
buffeting with the wild waves of life, and learning by heart that bitter
lesson they call the world, to come back to what was once a home, can
form some notion of the mingled emotions of joy and sorrow with which I
drew near Reichenau.

As the road grew gradually more steep, and the mountain gorge became
narrower and wilder, I found myself at each moment in sight of some
well-remembered object. Now it was a well beside which I had often
rested; now a cross or a shrine beneath which I had knelt. Here was a
rocky eminence I had climbed, to gain a wider view of the winding valley
before me; here was a giant oak under which I had sheltered from a
storm. Every turn of the way brought up some scene, some incident, or
some train of long-forgotten thought of that time when, as a boy, I
wandered all alone, weaving fancies of the world, and making myself the
hero of a hundred stories. Sad and sorrowful as it is to reckon scores
with our hopes and mark how little life has borne out the promises
of our youth, yet I cannot help thinking that our grief is nobly
recompensed by the very memory of that time, that glorious time, when,
shadowed by no scepticism, nor darkened by any distrust, we were happy
and hopeful and confiding. It is not alone that we recur to those
memories with pleasure, but we are actually better for the doi