fight
against your country. I see you here. Can it be that you have at last
returned in your allegiances to the flag for which your forefathers
died?"

Poor Colonel Carvel

"I am still of the same mind, Silas," he said.

The Judge turned his face away, his thin lips moving as in prayer. But
they knew that he was not praying, "Silas," said Mr. Carvel, "we were
friends for twenty years. Let us be friends again, before--"

"Before I die," the Judge interrupted, "I am ready to die. Yes, I am
ready. I have had a hard life, Comyn, and few friends. It was my fault.
I--I did not know how to make them. Yet no man ever valued those few more
than! But," he cried, the stern fire unquenched to the last, "I would
that God had spared me to see this Rebellion stamped out. For it will be
stamped out." To those watching, his eyes seemed fixed on a distant
point, and the light of prophecy was in them. "I would that God had
spared me to see this Union supreme once more. Yes, it will be supreme. A
high destiny is reserved for this nation--! I think the highest of all on
this earth." Amid profound silence he leaned back on the pillows from
which he had risen, his breath coming fast. None dared look at the
neighbor beside them.

It was Stephen's mother who spoke. "Would you not like to see a
clergyman, Judge?" she asked.

The look on his face softened as he turned to her.

"No, madam," he answered; "you are clergyman enough for me. You are near
enough to God--there is no one in this room who is not worthy to stand in
the presence of death. Yet I wish that a clergyman were here, that he
might listen to one thing I have to say. When I was a boy I worked my way
down the river to New York, to see the city. I met a bishop there. He
said to me, 'Sit down, my son, I want to talk to you. I know your father
in Albany. You are Senator Whipple's son.' I said to him, 'No, sir, I am
not Senator Whipple's son. I am no relation of his.' If the bishop had
wished to talk to me after that, Mrs. Brice, he might have made my life a
little easier--a little sweeter. I know that they are not all like that.
But it was by just such things that I was embittered when I was a boy."
He stopped, and when he spoke again, it was more slowly, more gently,
than any of them had heard him speak in all his life before. "I wish that
some of the blessings which I am leaving now had come to me then--when I
was a boy. I might have done my little share in making the world a