e men to rally and follow him, it was all in
vain--all as vain as the effort to stop the firing made by the chivalric
Virginia colonel, who leaped forward, with a few daring men at his back,
to capture the resolute Yankee and his precious flag. They got them; but
the life-blood was welling from the hero's breast as they raised him
gently from the silken folds. The Virginians knew a brave man when they
saw one, and they carried him tenderly into their lines and wrote his
last messages, and that night they sent the honored body back to his
brigade, and so the stricken father found and brought home all that was
left of the gallant boy in whom his hopes were centred.

For a time Bessie's letters languished after this, though she had
written nearly every week during the winter and early spring. Lieutenant
Abbot, on the other hand, appeared to redouble his deep interest. His
letters were full of sympathy--of a tenderness that seemed to be with
difficulty repressed. She read these to her mourning father--they were
so full of sorrow for the bitter loss that had befallen them, so rich
with soldierly sentiment and with appreciation of Guthrie's heroic
character and death, so welcome with reminiscence of him. Not that he
and Abbot had met on the Peninsula--it was the unhappy lot of the
Massachusetts--th to be held with McDowell's corps in front of
Washington while their comrades were doing sharp, soldierly work down
along the Chickahominy. But even where they were, said these letters,
men talked by the hour of how Guthrie Warren had died at Seven
Pines--how daring Phil Kearney himself had ridden up and held forth--

"The one hand still left,"

and asked him his name just before the final advance on the thicket. One
letter contained a copy of some soldierly verses her Massachusetts
correspondent had written--"Warren's Death at Seven Pines"--in which he
placed him peer with Warren who fell at Bunker Hill. The verses thrilled
through her heart and soul and brought a storm of tears--tears of
mingled pride and love and hopeless sorrow from her aging father's
eyes. No wonder she soon began to write more frequently. These
letters from Virginia were the greatest joy her father had, she told
herself, and though she wrote through a mist that blurred the page, she
soon grew conscious of a strange, shy sense of comfort, of a thrilling
little spring of glad emotion, of tender, shrinking, sensitive delight,
and by the time the hot summer wa