d man.

"God help him! he's gone to tell the old woman," said the postmaster as he
blew his nose on a red handkerchief.

The preacher preached a funeral sermon for the boy, and on the little
pyramid that marked the family lot in the burying-ground they carved the
words: "Killed in honorable battle, Hiram Snyder, aged nineteen." Not
long after, strange, yellow, bearded men in faded blue began to arrive.
Great welcomes were given them; and at the regular Wednesday evening
prayer-meeting thanksgivings were poured out for their safe return, with
names of company and regiment duly mentioned for the Lord's better
identification. Bees were held for some of these returned farmers, where
twenty teams and fifty men, old and young, did a season's farm-work in a
day, and split enough wood for a year. At such times the women would bring
big baskets of provisions, and long tables would be set, and there were
very jolly times, with cracking of many jokes that were veterans, and the
day would end with pitching horseshoes, and at last with singing "Auld
Lang Syne."

It was at one such gathering that a ghost appeared--a lank, saffron ghost,
ragged as a scarecrow--wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a
cavalryman's overcoat with no coat beneath it. The apparition was a youth
of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance
well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden several days on top
of a freight-car that was near the engine.

This ghost was Hiram Snyder.

All forgave him the shock of surprise he caused us--all except the
minister who had preached his funeral sermon. Years after I heard this
minister remark in a solemn, grieved tone: "Hiram Snyder is a man who can
not be relied on."

* * * * *

As the years pass, the miracle of the seasons means less to us. But what
country boy can forget the turning of the leaves from green to gold, and
the watchings and waitings for the first hard frost that ushers in the
nutting season! And then the first fall of snow, with its promise of
skates and sleds and tracks of rabbits, and mayhap bears, and strange
animals that only come out at night, and that no human eye has ever seen!

Beautiful are the seasons; and glad I am that I have not yet quite lost my
love for each. But now they parade past with a curious swiftness! They
look at me out of wistful eyes, and sometimes one calls to me as she goes
by and asks, "Why have you don