ave read your book, now read mine." He drew off his coat and showed
his wrists and arms, blue and waled. "Can you read that, sir?"

"No."

"All the better for you: Spanish fetters, general." He showed a white
scar on his shoulder. "Can you read that? This is what I cut out of it,"
and he handed the governor a little round stone as big and almost as
regular as a musket-ball.

"Humph! that could hardly have been fired from a French musket."

"Can you read this?" and he showed him a long cicatrix on his other arm.

"Knife I think," said the governor.

"You are right, sir: Spanish knife. Can you read this?" and opening his
bosom he showed a raw wound on his breast.

"Oh, the devil!" cried the governor.

The wounded man put his rusty coat on again, and stood erect, and
haughty, and silent.

The general eyed him, and saw his great spirit shining through this man.
The more he looked the less could the scarecrow veil the hero from his
practised eye. He said there must be some mistake, or else he was in
his dotage; after a moment's hesitation, he added, "Be seated, if you
please, and tell me what you have been doing all these years."

"Suffering."

"Not all the time, I suppose."

"Without intermission."

"But what? suffering what?"

"Cold, hunger, darkness, wounds, solitude, sickness, despair, prison,
all that man can suffer."

"Impossible! a man would be dead at that rate before this."

"I should have died a dozen deaths but for one thing; I had promised her
to live."

There was a pause. Then the old soldier said gravely, but more kindly,
to the young one, "Tell me the facts, captain" (the first time he had
acknowledged his visitor's military rank).

An hour had scarce elapsed since the rusty figure was stopped by the
sentinels at the gate, when two glittering officers passed out under
the same archway, followed by a servant carrying a furred cloak. The
sentinels presented arms. The elder of these officers was the governor:
the younger was the late scarecrow, in a brand-new uniform belonging to
the governor's son. He shone out now in his true light; the beau ideal
of a patrician soldier; one would have said he had been born with a
sword by his side and drilled by nature, so straight and smart, yet easy
he was in every movement. He was like a falcon, eye and all, only, as
it were, down at the bottom of the hawk's eye lay a dove's eye. That
compound and varying eye seemed to say, I can love, I can fight: I