er turned his face toward the old colors with a woman's
blessing!

He followed them--so ragged, so scarred and pierced now, that they would
scarcely hold together--to Quatre Bras and Ligny. He stood beside them,
in an awful stillness of many men, shadowy through the mist and drizzle
of a wet June forenoon, on the field of Waterloo. And down to that hour
the picture in his mind of the French officer had never been compared
with the reality.

The famous regiment was in action early in the battle, and received its
first check in many an eventful year, when he was seen to fall. But it
swept on to avenge him, and left behind it no such creature in the world
of consciousness as Lieutenant Richard Doubledick.

Through pits of mire and pools of rain; along deep ditches, once roads,
that were pounded and ploughed to pieces by artillery, heavy wagons,
tramp of men and horses, and the struggle of every wheeled thing that
could carry wounded soldiers; jolted among the dying and the dead, so
disfigured by blood and mud as to be hardly recognizable for humanity;
dead, as to any sentient life that was in it, and yet alive,--the form
that had been Lieutenant Richard Doubledick, with whose praises England
rang, was conveyed to Brussels. There it was tenderly laid down in
hospital; and there it lay, week after week, through the long, bright
summer days, until the harvest, spared by war, had ripened and was
gathered in.

Slowly laboring, at last, through a long, heavy dream of confused time
and place, presenting faint glimpses of army surgeons whom he knew, and
of faces that had been familiar to his youth,--dearest and kindest among
them, Mary Marshall's, with a solicitude upon it more like reality than
anything he could discern,--Lieutenant Richard Doubledick came back to
life. To the beautiful life of a calm autumn evening sunset, to the
peaceful life of a fresh, quiet room with a large window standing open;
a balcony beyond, in which were moving leaves and sweet-smelling
flowers; beyond, again, the clear sky, with the sun full in his sight,
pouring its golden radiance on his bed.

It was so tranquil and so lovely that he thought he had passed into
another world. And he said in a faint voice, "Taunton, are you near me?"

A face bent over him. Not his, his mother's.

"I came to nurse you. We have nursed you many weeks. You were moved here
long ago. Do you remember nothing?"

"Nothing."

The lady kissed his cheek, and held his