door
and watched his figure as it grew dimmer and disappeared in the dusk of
the distant street. When they returned to the cheerfulness of the
lighted room, the younger burst into tears.

"We have doomed him," she said. "We watched him when he went away, and
looked after him as long as he could be seen. He will never come back.
His young life will fade out and disappear, just as we saw him fading
away in the darkness."

A month later the young soldier was dead; and something more than
ordinary reasoning will be necessary to persuade the two cousins--the
younger and more impressive, especially--that their gazing after him did
not cast an evil omen on his fate and a blight upon his life. Another
near relative has since gone away on the same patriotic errand; but when
the farewells were spoken in the lighted room, the two girls escaped at
once and hid themselves in another apartment, so that they should not
even see him disappear through the door. When last heard from,[10] fever
and bullet had yet spared him; and what more is needed to make the two
young girls hopelessly superstitious for life, at least in this one
regard? They are not the only persons who have seen and felt that
_fading out in the darkness_ as an omen; for the same observer who once
stood on the bluff at Long Branch, as a heavy night of storm was
closing, and saw the "Star of the West" gradually fade away and
disappear into that threatening storm and darkness--unconscious that she
was to emerge again to play so important a part in the drama of the
nation's degradation,--the same observer saw the same omen at Niblo's
not long ago, when the poor Jewess of Miss Bateman's wonderful "Leah"
fell back step by step into the crowd, as the curtain was dropping, her
last hope withered and her last duty done, and nothing remaining but to
"follow on with my people."

[Footnote 10: February 1st, 1863.]

And at all such times Proserpine comes back, as she may have cast
wistful glances towards the vanishing home of her childhood, when the
rude hands of the ravishers were bearing her away from the spot where
she was gathering flowers in the vale of Enna; and we think of Orpheus
taking that fatal, wistful last look back at Eurydice, with the thought
in his eyes that _could not_ give her up even for a moment, when
emerging to the outer air from the flames and smoke of Tartarus. Wistful
glances back at all we have lost are embodied; and all these long,
agonizing appeals