cattered abroad in the gardens and shrubberies at their rejoicings,
Captain Double-dick passes through the open porch into the lofty
stone hall. There, being a total stranger, he is almost scared by the
intrusive clanking of his boots. Suddenly he starts back, feeling his
face turn white! For, in the gallery looking down at him, is the French
officer whose picture he has carried in his mind so long and so far.
The latter, disappearing in another instant for the staircase, enters
directly afterwards with a bright sudden look upon his countenance,
"Such a look as it had worn in that fatal moment," so well and so
terribly remembered! All this was portrayed with startling vividness
by the Author of the little sketch in his capacity as the sympathetic
realizer of the dreams of his own imagination.

Exquisite was the last glimpse of the delineation, when the
Captain--after many internal revulsions of feeling, while he gazes
through the window of the bed-chamber allotted to him in the old
chateau, "whence he could see the smiling prospect and the peaceful
vineyards "--thinks musingly to himself, "Spirit of my departed friend,
is it through thee these better thoughts are rising in my mind! Is it
thou who hast shown me, all the way I have been drawn to meet this man,
the blessings of the altered time! Is it thou who hast sent thy stricken
mother to me, to stay my angry hand! Is it from thee the whisper comes,
that this man only did his duty as thou didst--and as I did through thy
guidance, which saved me, here on earth--and that he did no more!"
Then it was, we were told, there came to him the second and crowning
resolution of his life: "That neither to the French officer, nor to the
mother of his departed friend, nor to any soul while either of the two
was living, would he breathe what only _he_ knew." Then it was that
the author perfected his Reading by the simple utterance of its closing
words--"And when he touched that French officer's glass with his own
that day at dinner, he secretly forgave him--forgave him in the name of
the Divine Forgiver." With a moral no less noble and affecting, no
less grand and elevating than this, the lovely idyll closed. The final
glimpse of the scene at the old Aix chateau was like the view of a
sequestered orchard through the ivied porchway of a village church.
The concluding words of the prelection were like the sound of the organ
voluntary at twilight, when the worshippers are dispersing.