away by the gross mismanagement of
those in command,--all these are matters that have no connection
whatever with the present relation. The gist of the newspaper paragraph
was true--the consolidation of the two regiments had been effected, and
Colonel Egbert Crawford had left Now York for Washington, on
staff-service.

When he left his legal office on the day of his departure for
Washington, he carried with him a package the shape of which none could
mistake. It contained a sword. So much any eye could see. But no eye
could see what lay beneath. It has been more than once indicated that so
far as an evil man could love purely, Egbert Crawford really loved the
little cousin for whom he was playing so unfairly. Sword-factories had
sprung up, since the breaking out of the war, along the little streams
which emptied into the Mohawk, through the Oneida Valley; and some of
them kept up the clink of the trip-hammers and the whirr of the
emory-wheels that shaped and polished sword-blades, not far from West
Falls. One day, in June, while his star seemed to be so certainly in the
ascendant in the family of John Crawford, Mary and himself had visited
one of those factories. Impressed by the intelligence of his remarks on
the manufacture, and perhaps willing to curry favor with the commander
of a regiment just going into the field, the superintendent of the
sword-factory had presented the officer with a splendid plain
light-cavalry sabre with its brazen hilt and heavy steel scabbard--a
most deadly and effective weapon, upon which one could depend in battle
almost as well as upon the best blade forged in Damascus. That sword
Mary had carried home in her own hands, presenting it to him afterwards,
in a moment of good feeling, with a playful word of confidence in his
valor, which he had never forgotten. That blade, hallowed by the little
hand of Mary Crawford which had once pressed its hilt, was the one which
he carried with him that day as he left his office for no imaginary
"field," but one of bloody reality.

Would he have been superstitious enough to connect the fact with his own
past or future fate, had he known that Aunt Synchy, the old Obi woman of
Thomas Street, was that very day lying dead on the floor of her
miserable room, having had a dose of one of her own insidious poisons
administered in her tea by Master Jeffy, who had become almost too much
of an expert in the art,--because she would not allow him the
extravagance o