hink good-bye to him. But," her eye wandering
vaguely, "I said good-bye to my little basket I had packed it at home
for my journey, you know. I thought Joe would laugh when he saw some
things I had there. But it was all over now. So I went down to the
water's edge, and set it down; and then I went up, and climbed up on the
parapet of the bridge, and then I heard a cry, and I was jerked down to
the ground. When I came to myself, I was in a bed. They had ice on my
head. They told me they had found my basket, and so knew my name. I laid
there for several days. It was soldiers that found me. They paid for me
at the tavern. But the regiment was going on. One day, when I was able
to sit up, two of them said to me, they would take me to see Joe. They
took me on the cars; all the way I had to lie down, with ice to my head.
We came a long way; every time we stopped, they said we were going to
Joe. I didn't know, my brain was like fire in my head."

Ellen was sent on by the officers of this regiment, and lodged by them
for safe-keeping in the jail at Wheeling. The long-suspended brain-fever
had set in. She was taken through the streets, her clothes ragged and
muddy, her head bare, followed by a curious crowd of idlers, with just
enough reason left to know what the house was in which they lodged her.
Cruel as they were in act, it proved a kindness to the girl. The jailer
and his family nursed her carefully, and gave her a large, airy room in
the old debtors' prison.

After she had been there three weeks, a person who had accidentally seen
Ellen that first day on the street went to the jail and asked to see
her. A whim, perhaps, the fruit of idleness or curiosity. But Ellen
thought otherwise. She was clothed and in her right mind now, and sat
inside of the iron door, looking with her large, grave, blue eyes
searchingly at her visitor. "God sent you," she said, quietly.

That night she told the jailer's wife that her new friend had promised
to come the next morning and take her out.

"She may disappoint you, Ellen."

"No. I know God meant her to come, and I shall see my brother again."

She was strangely cheerful; it seemed as if, in that long torpor, some
vision of the future had in truth been given to her.

"I shall see Joe," she would repeat steadily, a great glow on her face,
"I know."

She carried her little basket, going to her friend's house. It was here
I saw Ellen. She was not pretty,--with an awkward, ungainly buil