they have untimely flown.

Owing to the uncertainty of the regiment's destination, Captain Edney had
told his men to have all their friends' letters to them directed to
Washington. There they had been sent, and there, through some
misunderstanding or neglect, they remained. And though a small mail-bag
full had been written to Frank, this was the reason he had never yet
received one.

Alas for those missing letters! The lack of them injured Frank more
deeply and lastingly than simply by wounding his heart. For soon that
hurt began to heal. He was fast getting used to living without news from
his family. He consoled himself by entering more fully than he had done
at first into the excitements of the camp. And the sacred influence of
HOME, so potent to solace and to save, even at a distance, was wanting.

And here begins a portion of Frank's history which I would be glad to
pass over in silence. But, as many boys will probably read this story who
are not altogether superior to temptation, and who do not yet know how
easy it is for even a good-hearted, honest, and generous lad sometimes to
forget his mother's lessons and his own promises, and commence that slow,
gradual, downward course, which nearly always begins before we are aware,
and from which it is then so hard to turn back; and as many may learn
from his experience, and so save themselves much shame and their friends
much anguish, it is better that Frank's history should be related without
reserve.

In the first place, he learned to smoke. He began by taking a whiff, now
and then, out of the pipe of a comrade, just to be in fashion, and to
keep himself warm those chill evenings and mornings. Then a tobacco
planter gave him, in return for some polite act on his part, a bunch of
tobacco leaves, which Frank, with his usual ingenuity, made up into
cigars for himself and friends. The cigars consumed, he obtained more
tobacco of some negroes, addicted himself to a pipe, and became a regular
smoker.

Now, I don't mean to say that this, of itself, was a very great sin. It
was, however, a foolish thing in Frank to form at his age a habit which
might tyrannize over him for life, and make him in the end, as he himself
once said to John Winch, "a filthy, tobacco-spitting old man."

But the worst of it was, he had promised his mother he would not smoke.
He thought he had a good excuse for breaking his word to her. "I am
sure," he said, "if she knew how cold I am sometimes,