t it might never be
uprooted:--and 'twas that which made things the more pitiful.

Tom and I went out, with a large number of the town's people, to watch
the rebel soldiers depart, and we saw Philip with his company, and
exchanged with him a smile and a wave of the hat. How little we
thought that one of us he was never to meet again, that the other he
was not to see in many years, and that four of those years were to
pass ere he should set foot again in Queen Street.

Many things, to be swiftly passed over in my history, occurred in
those four years. One of these, the most important to me, happened a
short time after Philip's departure for the North. It was a brief
conversation with Fanny, and it took place upon the wayside walk at
what they call the Battery, at the green Southern end of the town,
where it is brought to a rounded point by the North and East Rivers
approaching each other as they flow into the bay. To face the gentle
breeze, I stopped and turned so we might look Southward over the bay,
toward where, at the distant Narrows, Long Island and Staten Island
seem to meet and close it in.

"I don't like to look out yonder," said Fanny. "It makes me imagine
I'm away on the ocean, by myself. And it seems so lonely."

"Why, you poor child," replied I, "'tis a sin you should ever feel
lonely; you do so much to prevent others being so." I turned my back
upon the bay, and led her past the fort, toward the Broadway. "You
see," said I, abruptly, glancing at her brown eyes, which dropped in a
charming confusion, "how much you need a comrade." I remember I was
not entirely unconfused myself at that moment, for inspiration had
suddenly shown me my opportunity, and how to use it, and some inward
trepidation was inseparable from a plunge into the matter I was now
resolved upon going through.

"Why," says she, blushing, and seeming, as she walked, to take a great
interest in her pretty feet, "I have several comrades as it is."

"Yes. But I mean one that should devote himself to you alone. Philip
has Margaret; and besides, he is gone now, and so is Mr. Cornelius.
And Tom will be finding a wife some day, and your parents cannot live
for ever, and your friends will be married one after another."

"Poor me!" says she, with a sigh of comic wofulness. "How helpless and
alone you make me feel!"

"Not so entirely alone, neither! There's one I didn't mention."

"And that one, too, I suppose, will be running off some day."