temple in the hills
Before he failed and died!

And Nick laughed gently daily
That he alone had guessed
The mystery of the elder Funk
That had puzzled all the rest.
And younger Nick thought gently:
"Since that chap asked for Funk
There's been commotion in this town,
And daddy's always drunk."

VI.

But once the ring of rapid hoofs
Came sudden in the night,
And on the Blue Ridge summits flashed
The camp-fire's baleful light.
Young Nick was in the saddle,
With half the valley men,
To find that old man's fighting sons
Who kept the ferry glen.

And like the golden ore that grew
To his divining rod,
The shining, armed soldiery
Swarmed o'er the clover sod;
O'er Crampton's gap the columns fought,
And by Antietam fords,
Till all the world, Nick Hammer thought,
At Funkstown had drawn swords.

VII.

Together, as in quiet days
Before the battle's roar,
Nick Hammer and his one-legg'd son
Smoked by the tavern door.
The dead who slept on Sharpsburg Heights
Were not more still than they;
They leaned together like the hills,
But nothing had to say;

Save once, as at his wooden stump
The young man looked awhile,
And damned the man who made that war--
He saw Nick Hammer smile.
"My little boy," the old man said,
"Think long as I have thunk--
You'll find this war rests on the head
Of that 'air Mister Funk!"

JUDGE WHALEY'S DEMON.

In the little town of Chester, near the Bay of Chesapeake, lived an
elegant man, with the softest manners in the world and a shadow
forever on his countenance. He bore a blameless character and an
honored name. He had one son of the same name as his own, Perry
Whaley. This son was forever with him, for use or for pleasure; they
could not be happy separated, nor congenial together. A destiny seemed
to unite them, but with it also a baleful memory. The negroes
whispered that in the boy's conception and birth was a secret of
shame; he was not this father's son, and his mother had confessed it.

That mother was gone--fled to a distant part of the world with her
betrayer--and the divorce was recorded while yet young Perry Whaley
was a babe. But the boy never knew it: his origin reposed in the
sensitive memory of his father only, and every day the father looked
at the son long a