d to play the character, in the most demure and charming
manner. She had for him a tender and clinging affection; she believed
in him with all her heart, and he was not altogether unworthy of such
love and confidence,--he was a very good boy, as boys go.

Well, Heinrich marched away with the rest of the admirable German band,
proudly and gayly they said,--the pluckiest of drummer-boys. But he
had seemed neither proud nor gay, a few hours before, when he had run
down to the little lakeside farm, to take leave of his aunt and cousin.
He had looked pale and very sad. He had said farewell in a voice
choked with sobs, and when he ran down the little garden walk to the
road, great tears were dropping fast on the bright buttons of his new
uniform. His "little wife" went to her little chamber, knelt down
beside her little bed, and said a little prayer for him,--then dashed
the bitter dew from her sweet violet eyes, and went about her household
duties, like the dear little woman that she was.

Alas, it was the same old sad story! The father was killed at
Pittsburg Landing, and the oldest brother wounded and taken captive: he
afterwards died in Libby Prison. The second brother returned home,
after a year's hard marching and fighting, a pale, wan invalid, with
one sleeve of his worn blue coat hanging empty. The third brother is
now an officer in the triumphant Union army, and let us thank God for
him, for his work is nearly done.

The sorrow of the little German household did not end with the death of
the beloved father, and of brave Gustave, and the loss of the good
right arm of poor Fritz. Heinrich was also taken prisoner, in a sudden
night attack on his regiment in Tennessee, and carried off by one of
the robber bands of the barbarous Forrest. His tender age, and gentle,
prepossessing ways, won him no pity. He was shut up, with thousands of
others, in one of those horrible slaughter-pens of the South, called a
"stockade," where he languished for many months, bearing all his
hardships with the utmost sweetness and patience, feeling that his
suffering was but a drop to the great ocean of human agony and despair
around him.

Heinrich had been religiously brought up, and while many brave men
about him lost all faith and hope, and believed themselves forgotten by
the God who made them, he believed that over their loathsome
prison-yard hovered hosts of pitying angels, and that above and around
the vast field of fraterna