could I stand aloof from my best, my truest, my
earliest friend, and see him, alone and unaided, oppose his weak and final
struggle to the unrelenting career of persecution. Between these two
alternatives the former could be my only choice; and what a choice!

Oh, how I thought over the wild heroism of the battle-field, the reckless
fury of the charge, the crash, the death-cry, and the sad picture of the
morrow, when all was past, and a soldier's glory alone remained to shed its
high halo over the faults and the follies of the dead.

As night fell, the twinkling of the distant lighthouses--some throwing
a column of light from the very verge of the horizon, others shining
brightly, like stars, from some lofty promontory--marked the different
outlines of the coast, and conveyed to me the memory of that broken and
wild mountain tract that forms the bulwark of the Green Isle against the
waves of the Atlantic. Alone and silently I trod the deck, now turning to
look towards the shore, where I thought I could detect the position of some
well-known headland, now straining my eyes seaward to watch some bright
and flitting star, as it rose from or merged beneath the foaming water,
denoting the track of the swift pilot-boat, or the hardy lugger of the
fisherman; while the shrill whistle of the floating sea-gull was the only
sound save the rushing waves that broke in spray upon our quarter.

What is it that so inevitably inspires sad and depressing thoughts as we
walk the deck of some little craft in the silence of the night's dark
hours? No sense of danger near, we hold on our course swiftly and steadily,
cleaving the dark waves and bending gracefully beneath the freshening
breeze. Yet still the motion, which, in the bright sunshine of the noonday
tells of joy and gladness, brings now no touch of pleasure to our hearts.
The dark and frowning sky, the boundless expanse of gloomy water, spread
like some gigantic pall around us, and our thoughts either turn back upon
the saddest features of the past or look forward to the future with a
sickly hope that all may not be as we fear it.

Mine were, indeed, of the gloomiest; and the selfishness alone of the
thought prevented me from wishing that, like many another, I had fallen by
a soldier's death on the plains of the Peninsula!

As the night wore on, I wrapped myself in my cloak and lay down beneath the
bulwark. The whole of my past life came in review before me, and I thought
over m