from an inborn choice to be clean. That
was all. Pah! God help us! What was this life worth, after all? He glanced
at the town, laid in ashes. The war was foul indeed, yet in it there was
room for high chivalric purpose. Could he so end his life? She would know
it, and love him more that he died an honorable death. Shame! and cowardly
too!--was there nothing worth finding in the world besides a woman's
love?--he was no puling boy. If there were, what was it--for him?

He looked down at the dull sweep of the valley, heard the whistle of the
train that was carrying her away, and saw the black trail of smoke against
the sky,--stood silently watching it until the last bit of smoke even had
disappeared. A woman would have worked off in tears or hysteric cries what
pain came then; but the man only swallowed once or twice, lighted his
cigar, and with a grim smile went down the road.

* * * * *

My story is nearly ended. I have no time nor wish, these war-days, to
study dramatic effects, or to shift large and cautiously painted scenes or
the actors, for the mere tickling of your eyes and ears. One or two facts
in the history of these people are enough to give for my purpose: they are
for women,--nervous, greedy, discontented women: to learn from them (if I
could put the truth into forcible enough English) that truth of Christ's
teaching, which has unaccountably been let slip out of our modern
theology, that his help is temporal as well as spiritual, deals with
coarsest, most practical needs, and is sworn to her who struggles to be
true to her best self, that what she asks, believing, she shall receive.
_That_ is the point,--believing. "Therefore I say unto you, What things
soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye
_shall_ have them."

How many tragedies of life besides finespun novels would suddenly be
brought to an end, if the heroine were only a common-sense, believing
Christian of the old-fashioned pattern! Doctor Blecker, going into the war
after the day he parted from the girl at Harper's Ferry, with a sense of
as many fighting influences in his life as there were in the army, had no
under-sight of the clear mapping-out of the years for him, controlled by
the simple request of the woman yonder who loved him. She dared not repeat
that prayer now; but it had gone up once out of a childish trust, and was
safely written down above.

Let us pass over five or six mont