t take no for an answer. The wedding
was in the Methodist church, and was a glittering public function. The
groom was not only splendidly handsome in a French way, but wore a
shining uniform, and upon his breast sparkled a profusion of medals. A
vast crowd outside the church waited to cheer the happy couple, and
slinking at the rear of this was a drab Lyman Teaford--without medals,
without uniform, dull, prosaic, enduring at this moment pangs of the
keenest remorse for his hasty act of a year before. He, too, would never
be the same man again.

In truth, the beginning Teaford menage lay under the most unfavourable
portents. Things looked dark for it.

Yet despite the forebodings of Wilbur and Winona, it began to be
suspected, even by them, that the war would wear itself out, as old
Doctor Purdy said, by first intention. And in spite of affecting
individual dramas they began to feel that it must wear itself out with
no help from them. It seemed to have settled into a quarrel among
foreign nations with which we could rightfully have no concern. Winona
learned, too, that her picture of the nurse on a battlefield
administering cordial to wounded combatants from the small keg at her
waist was based upon an ancient and doubtless always fanciful print.

Wilbur, too, gathered from the newspapers that, though he might die upon
a battlefield, there was little chance that a French general would be
commissioned to repeat his last words to Mrs. Lyman Teaford of Newbern
Center. He almost decided that he would not become a soldier. Some years
before, it is true, he had been drawn to the life by a government
poster, designed by one who must himself have been a capable dramatist.

"Join the Army and See the World," urged the large-lettered legend above
the picture.

The latter revealed an entrancing tropical scene with graceful palms
adorning the marge of a pinkly sun-kissed sea. At a table in the
background two officers consulted with a private above an
important-looking map, while another pleased-looking private stood at
attention near by. At the left foreground a rather obsequious-looking
old colonel seemed to be entreating a couple of spruce young privates to
drop round for tea that afternoon and meet the ladies.

Had Wilbur happened upon this poster in conjunction with the resolve of
Miss Pearl King to be sensible, it is possible his history might have
been different. But its promise had faded from his memory ere his life
wa