e George,--but what delight will you
find in all the heavenly mansions, if love be not there?

"I'll enlist," said the master of this mansion of misery in the midst of
the garden of delight, one day.

"I would," replied his wife.

They spoke with equal vigor, but neither believed in the other. The
instant the man dropped the book he had been reading, he was like Samson
with his hair shorn, for his wife couldn't tell one letter from another;
and when she saw him sit down on the stone wall which surrounded their
potato-field, overgrown with weeds, she marched out boldly to the corner
of the wood-shed, where never any wood was, and attacked him thus:--

"S'pose you show fight awhile in that potato-patch afore you go to fight
Ribils. Gov'ment don't need you any more than I do. May be it'll find
out getting ain't gaining!"

She had no answer. The man was thinking, when she interrupted him, as
she was always doing, that, if he could secure the State and town
bounty, that would be some provision for the woman and child. As for
himself, he was indifferent as to where he was sent, or how soon. But if
he went away, they might look for him to come again. Gabriel's trumpet,
he thought, would be a more welcome sound than his wife's voice.

He enlisted. The bounties paid him were left in the hands of a trusty
neighbor, and were to be appropriated to the supply of his family's
needs; and he went away along with a boat-load of recruits,--his own man
no longer. Even his wife noticed the change in him, from the morning
when he put on his uniform and began to obey orders, for she had time to
notice. Several days elapsed after enlistment before the company's ranks
were complete, and the captain would not report at head-quarters, he
said, until his own townsfolk had supplied the number requisite.

_Even_ his wife noticed the change, I said; for, contrary to what is
usual and expected, she was not the first to perceive that the slow and
heavy step had now a spring in it, and that there was a light in his
clouded eyes. She supposed the new clothes made the difference.

Nearly a year had passed away, and this woman was leaning over the rail
fence which surrounded a barren field, and listening, while she leaned,
to the story of Ezra Cramer, just home from the war. She listened well,
even eagerly, to what he had to tell, and seemed moved by the account in
ways various as pride and indignation.

"I wish I had him here!" she said, when he