prisoners, and he will be
sent home on Thursday next."

Corny's face fell.

"Is he, yer Honor?" very hesitatingly; and then, suddenly clearing up,
"and hurra fur that, too! and I'm an ongrateful baste to be sorry that
he's to be clear of this hole,--bad scran to it!--and long life till
him, and a blessin' go wid him! and if"--choking--"we don't mate on
earth, sure the Lord won't kape him foriver in purgatory, and he so kind
and feelin' for the sick."

The doctor could not suppress a laugh at this limited hope.

"But, Corny, what if you are to be sent home too?"

"Me?--and was it me yer Honor was sayin'? Och, Hivin bless ye fur that
word!--and it's not laughin' at me is yer Honor? Sure ye'd niver have
the heart to chate a poor boy like that. All the Saints be praised! I'm
a man agin, and not a starvin' machine; and I shall see ye, Mary,
mavourneen! but, och, the poor boys that we're lavin'! Hurra! how iver
will I ate three males a day, and slape under a blanket, and think of
thim on the ground and starvin' by inches!"

During the remainder of his stay, Corny balanced between joy and
his selfishness in being joyful, in a manner sufficiently
ludicrous,--breaking out one moment in the most extravagant
demonstration, to be twitched from it the next by a penitential spasm.
As for Drake, hardly yet clear of the shadows that haunted his fever, he
but mistily comprehended the change that was before him; and it will
need weeks and perhaps months of home-nursing and watching before body
and mind can win back their former strength and tone.

Meanwhile, people of the North, what of the poor boys left behind at
Andersonville, starving, as Corny said, by inches, with the winter
before them, and their numbers swelled by the hundreds that a late Rebel
paper gleefully announces to be on their way from more Northern prisons?

DOCTOR JOHNS.

VII.

It was not easy in that day to bring together the opinions of a
Connecticut parish that had been jostled apart by a parochial quarrel,
and where old grievances were festering. Indeed, it is never easy to do
this, and unite opinions upon a new comer, unless he have some rare gift
of eloquence, which so dazes the good people that they can no longer
remember their petty griefs, or unless he manage with rare tact to pass
lightly over the sore points, and to anoint them by a careful hand with
such healing salves as he can concoct out of his pastoral charities. Mr.
Johns had neithe