bodied forth in a dozen sacred relics. Some of these
articles Elizabeth carefully cherished. It was rather late in the day
for her to assert a literary taste,--her reading having begun and ended
(naturally enough) with the ancient fiction of the "Scottish Chiefs." So
she could hardly help smiling, herself, sometimes, at her interest in
Jack's old college tomes. She carried several of them to her own
apartment, and placed them at the foot of her little bed, on a
book-shelf adorned, besides, with a pot of spring violets, a portrait of
General McClellan, and a likeness of Lieutenant Ford. She had a vague
belief that a loving study of their well-thumbed verses would remedy, in
some degree, her sad intellectual deficiencies. She was sorry she knew
so little: as sorry, that is, as she might be, for we know that she was
shallow. Jack's omniscience was one of his most awful attributes. And
yet she comforted herself with the thought, that, as he had forgiven her
ignorance, she herself might surely forget it. Happy Lizzie, I envy you
this easy path to knowledge! The volume she most frequently consulted
was an old German "Faust," over which she used to fumble with a battered
lexicon. The secret of this preference was in certain marginal notes in
pencil, signed "J.". I hope they were really of Jack's making.

Lizzie was always a small walker. Until she knew Jack, this had been
quite an unsuspected pleasure. She was afraid, too, of the cows, geese,
and sheep,--all the agricultural _spectra_ of the feminine imagination.
But now her terrors were over. Might she not play the soldier, too, in
her own humble way? Often with a beating heart, I fear, but still with
resolute, elastic steps, she revisited Jack's old haunts; she tried to
love Nature as he had seemed to love it; she gazed at his old sunsets;
she fathomed his old pools with bright plummet glances, as if seeking
some lingering trace of his features in their brown depths, stamped
there as on a fond human heart; she sought out his dear name, scratched
on the rocks and trees,--and when night came on, she studied, in her
simple way, the great starlit canopy, under which, perhaps, her warrior
lay sleeping; she wandered through the green glades, singing snatches of
his old ballads in a clear voice, made tuneful with love,--and as she
sang, there mingled with the everlasting murmur of the trees the faint
sound of a muffled bass, borne upon the south wind like a distant
drum-beat, respon