ntral Road in the morning, Richard being
so pillowed among cloaks and blankets and shawls, that he had quite the
comfort of lying in an ordinary bed; and that on Thursday night, the Tenth
of July, when the full moon had risen so high in heaven as to make the
coming midnight a very mockery of day, they rolled into the village of
Niagara Falls, and found a resting-place at the still wide-awake and
ever-lively Cataract.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TOM LESLIE AT NIAGARA--A DASH AT SCENERY THERE--A RENCONTRE--DEXTER
RALSTON ONCE MORE--UNION MAN OR REBEL?--TOM LESLIE DISCOUNTED.

It will be remembered that Tom Leslie, leaving Josephine Harris with a
sigh of regret at Utica (those jolly fellows do sigh sometimes, after
all!) went on to Niagara on the afternoon of the Fifth of July. Walter
Lane Harding had promised to join him at the Cataract, early in the
following week, if he could so arrange his business as to leave the city
on Sunday or Monday; but just now Leslie was alone--worse alone than he
ever remembered to have been at any former period of his life. Lost one
night in a pass of the Apennines, with some doubts whether he should
ever be able to find his way to supper and civilization, he had been
lonely enough for comfort; and pacing his solitary night round as a
sentinel under the frowning guns of Sebastopol, he had felt that
another friendly human face would be pleasant to see and a friendly
human voice something not be despised; but neither of those situations
could for a moment compare with the loneliness of that summer afternoon
and evening, while he was bowling along through the Genesee Valley.

The absence of the whole world is a grief, when we do not wish to be
alone, but that is a grief in the _general_. The coming of any one
person will break the spell and fill the void. But the absence of the
_one_, immediately after earth and air have seemed to be full of the
sacred presence, is grief in the _particular_. Only one can fill that
void, and the coming of that one is for the time impossible. The company
of thousands of others is then an aggravation and an insult, making the
loneliness worse by contrast with the apparent companionship of all
others.

Tom Leslie (this fact may have been sufficiently indicated before)--Tom
Leslie was deeply, irrevocably, hopelessly in love, and he had not even
taken the ordinary pains to deceive himself on the subject. He had found
his destiny and submitted to it, after a long per