e
prayer: "Father of Nations!--if it be possible let this cup pass from
us!" And yet the cup has not passed--we have been draining it to the
very dregs!

The introduction of this chapter, which does not in the least advance
the action of the story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every
artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical
composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and
thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here
introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background
of current events, certainly--without a knowledge of which their
actions might be altogether unaccountable. And general as may be a
feeling to-day, it must be caught and put upon record to-morrow, or the
very persons who held it most deeply will forget it by the third day.
Ten years hence--perhaps a year hence--the bitter humiliation through
which the country has been passing between the opening of 1861 and the
opening of 1863, will be almost entirely forgotten in after glory or
after shame. A few will remember, but faintly and dimly, as the old
veterans of the Revolution remembered in their tottering age the
conflicts through which they had passed in youth, beside Washington or
with Mad Anthony. A few will remember something of the truth, but only
as veteran play-goers remember a performance at the Old Park in its
palmy days--a Cooper or a Power prominent, but all the other actors lost
in the mists of time.

When Thomas Wilson left the field of Brandywine, after that disastrous
defeat, and with a bullet-hole through his neck, narrowly missing the
jugular, which had been received in aiding to rescue and bear off the
wounded Lafayette,--that battle-scene was so imprinted on his mind that
he believed he could ever afterwards, to his dying day, recall the
position of every squadron, and even the place of every rock and tree
beside which he had fought; and yet when he saw him, more than half a
century afterwards, hobbling along on his stout hickory cane to the
place where he was to draw the scant pittance afforded him by a nation
grudging in its gratitude--he remembered Lafayette and that he was
wounded in helping to bear him off--nothing more. No doubt John Wilson,
grandson of the old man, wounded in the assault at Fredericksburgh, came
away from that murderous field with the same impression of the eternity
of his own memory; but he will forget all except the