the
field of battle--and it was a severe frost. Pain kept me from sleep, but
I saw them as distinctly as in a dream--the mother lying with her child
in her bosom in our own bed. Was not that vision mockery enough to drive
me mad? After a few weeks a letter came to me from herself--and I kissed
it and pressed it to my heart; for no black seal was there--and I knew
that little Lucy was alive. No meaning for a while seemed to be in the
words--and then they began to blacken into ghastly characters--till at
last I gathered from the horrid revelation that she was sunk in sin and
shame, steeped for evermore in utmost pollution.

"A friend was with me, and I gave it to him to read--for in my anguish
at first I felt no shame--and I watched his face as he read it, that I
might see corroboration of the incredible truth, which continued to look
like falsehood, even while it pierced my heart with agonising pangs. 'It
may be a forgery,' was all he could utter--after long agitation; but the
shape of each letter was too familiar to my eyes--the way in which the
paper was folded--and I knew my doom was sealed. Hours must have passed,
for the room grew dark--and I asked him to leave me for the night. He
kissed my forehead--for we had been as brothers. I saw him next
morning--dead--cut nearly in two--yet had he left a paper for me,
written an hour before he fell, so filled with holiest friendship, that
oh! how even in my agony I wept for him, now but a lump of cold clay and
blood, and envied him at the same time a soldier's grave!

"And has the time indeed come that I can thus speak calmly of all that
horror? The body was brought into my room, and it lay all day and all
night close to my bed. But false was I to all our life-long
friendship--and almost with indifference I looked upon the corpse.
Momentary starts of affection seized me--but I cared little or nothing
for the death of him, the tender and the true, the gentle and the brave,
the pious and the noble-hearted; my anguish was all for her, the cruel
and the faithless, dead to honour, to religion dead--dead to all the
sanctities of nature--for her, and for her alone, I suffered all
ghastliest agonies--nor any comfort came to me in my despair, from the
conviction that she was worthless; for desperately wicked as she had
shown herself to be--oh! crowding came back upon me all our hours of
happiness--all her sweet smiles--all her loving looks--all her
affectionate words--all her conjug