et me lie still
all night there. Early in the morning, before day, I got up softly,
softly, I was so afraid they would hear me, and made a light. I wanted
to bid Joe farewell before I started."

"Where were you going, Ellen?"

"On, you know,"--with that grave, secretive look of the insane. "I _had_
to go. So I made a light. I wanted to write a letter to my brother, but
my head was so tired I could not; then I took my little Testament, and I
marked the fourteenth chapter of St. John. He knew that I liked that
best, and I thought that would be my letter. I wrote alongside of the
printing, 'Good bye, Joe.' Then I fastened it up, and directed it to
Joseph Carrol, Kanawha Salines."

"That was a wide direction, Ellen."

"Was it, Sir?" indifferently. "So Joe has it now. I think all his life
he'll look at that, and say, 'That was Sis's last word.' I went gently
out of the door, and I put my book in the post-office, and then I went
away."

She began, it appears, to retrace her way on the railroad-track on foot,
leaving her money and clothes at Mrs. Ford's, but carrying the little
basket carefully. The Williamses, thinking she had followed Joe,
searched for her in the direction of Grafton, and so failed to find her.
There are no villages between Fetterman and Fairmount,--only scattered
farm-houses, and but few of those,--the line of the railroad running
between solitary stretches of moorland, and in gloomy defiles of the
mountains. Ellen followed the road, a white, glaring, dusty line, all
day. Nothing broke the dreary silence but the whirr of some unseen bird
through the forests, or the hollow thud, thud of a woodpecker on a
far-off tree. Once or twice, too, a locomotive with a train of cars
rushed past her with a fierce yell. She slept that night by the roadside
with a fallen tree for a pillow, and the next morning began again her
plodding journey.

I come now to the saddest part of the poor girl's story, gathered from
her own indistinct remembrances. I mean to pass briefly over it. On the
latter part of this day's travel, Ellen had passed several of the
encampments which lined the road, but had escaped notice by making a
detour through the woods. A mile or two east of Fairmount, however,
coming near one, she went up to the first low shed; for the men had
thrown up temporary huts, part wood, part mud.

"It was a woman who was there," she said, in apology; "and I was not
very strong. I had eaten nothing but berries sinc