, Mrs. Simmons, and old Aunt Suse. He waved his hand to them and
all four waved back. A singular thrill ran through him. Could it be
possible that he would come again, and in the manner that the old woman
had predicted?

The path, in another minute, curved around the mountain, and the valley
was shut from view. Nor, as he rode on, did he catch another glimpse of
it. One might roam the mountains for months and never see the home of
Samuel Jarvis.

The two days passed without event. The weather remained fair, and no
one interfered with him. He slept the first night at a log cabin that
Jarvis had named, having reached it in due time, and the second day he
reached, also in due time, the old Wilderness Road.

Thence the boy advanced by easy stages into Virginia until he reached a
railroad, where he sold his horse and took a train for Richmond, having
come in a few days out of the cool, peaceful atmosphere of the mountains
into another, which was surcharged everywhere with the fiery breath of
war.

Harry realized as he approached the capital the deep intensity of
feeling in everybody. The Virginians were less volatile than the South
Carolinians, and they had long refused to go out, but now that they were
out they were pouring into the Southern army, and they were animated by
an extraordinary zeal. He began to hear new or unfamiliar names, Early,
and Ewell, and Jackson, and Lee, and Johnston, and Hill, and Stuart,
and Ashby, names that he would never forget, but names that as yet meant
little to him.

He had letters from his father and he expected to find his friends of
Charleston in Richmond or at the front. General Beauregard, whom he
knew, would be in command of the army threatening Washington, and he
would not go into a camp of strangers.

It was now early in June, and the country was at its best. On both
sides of the railway spread the fair Virginia fields, and the earth,
save where the ploughed lands stretched, was in its deepest tints of
green. Harry, thrusting his head from the window, looked eagerly ahead
at the city rising on its hills. Then a shade smaller than Charleston,
it, too, was a famous place in the South, and it was full of great
associations. Harry, like all the educated boys of the South, honored
and admired its public men. They were mighty names to him. He was
about to tread streets that had been trod by the famous Jefferson,
by Madison, Monroe, Randolph of Roanoke, and many others