dear friend,—­why should I be ashamed to say it?—­a lover, to whom I was to be married,—­as I hope all you girls may some day be happily married.  His country needed him, and I gave him up.  He came to fight for the Union and for Freedom, for he believed that all men are brothers.  He did not come back again—­he gave up his life for you.  Could I do less than he?  I came to the land that he sanctified by his death, and I have tried in my weak way to tend the plant he watered with his blood, and which, in the fullness of time, will blossom forth into the perfect flower of liberty.”

She could say no more, and as the whole audience thrilled in sympathy with her emotion, there was a hoarse cry from the men’s side of the room, and John forced his way to the aisle and rushed forward to the platform.

“Martha!  Martha!”

“Arthur!  O Arthur!”

Pent-up love burst the flood-gates of despair and oblivion, and caught these two young hearts in its torrent.  Captain Arthur Carey, of the 1st Massachusetts, long since reported missing, and mourned as dead, was restored to reason and to his world.

It seemed to him but yesterday that he had escaped from the Confederate prison at Salisbury; that in an encounter with a guard he had received a wound in the head; that he had wandered on in the woods, keeping himself alive by means of wild berries, with now and then a piece of bread or a potato from a friendly negro.  It seemed but the night before that he had laid himself down, tortured with fever, weak from loss of blood, and with no hope that he would ever rise again.  From that moment his memory of the past was a blank until he recognized Martha on the platform and took up again the thread of his former existence where it had been broken off.

* * * * *

And Cicely?  Well, there is often another woman, and Cicely, all unwittingly to Carey or to Martha, had been the other woman.  For, after all, her beautiful dream had been one of the kind that go by contraries.

The Passing of Grandison

I

When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps to be enough said to explain anything; for what a man will not do to please a woman is yet to be discovered.  Nevertheless, it might be well to state a few preliminary facts to make it clear why young Dick Owens tried to run one of his father’s negro men off to Canada.

In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the constant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the border States as to lead to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man from Ohio, moved by compassion for the sufferings of a certain bondman who happened to have a “hard master,” essayed to help the slave to freedom.  The attempt was discovered and frustrated; the abductor was tried and convicted for slave-stealing, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the penitentiary.  His death, after the expiration of only a small part of the sentence, from cholera contracted while nursing stricken fellow prisoners, lent to the case a melancholy interest that made it famous in anti-slavery annals.