ame,
twice or thrice repeated, of the town where Judge Priest lived. So he
bundled together a couple of copies and sent them South with a short
letter; and therefore it came about in due season, through the good
offices of the United States Post-office Department, that these
enclosures reached the judge on a showery afternoon as he loafed upon
his wide front porch, waiting for his supper.

First, he read Malley's letter and was glad to hear from Malley. With a
quickened interest he ran a plump thumb under the wrappings of the two
close-rolled papers, opened out one of them at page ten and read the
opening statement of Corporal Jacob Speck, for whom instantly the judge
conceived a long-distance fondness. Next he came to the letter that Miss
Hortense Engel had so accurately transcribed, and at the very first
words of it he sat up straighter, with a surprised and gratified little
grunt; for he had known them both--the writer of that letter and its
recipient. One still lived in his memory as a red-haired girl with a
pert, malicious face, and the other as a stripling youth in a ragged
gray uniform. And he had known most of those whose names studded the
printed lines so thickly. Indeed, some of them he still knew--only now
they were old men and old women--faded, wrinkled bucks and belles of a
far-distant day.

As he read the first words it came back to the judge, almost with the
jolting emphasis of a new and fresh sensation, that in the days of his
own youth he had never liked the girl who wrote that letter or the man
who received it. But she was dead this many and many a year--why, she
must have died soon after she wrote this very letter--the date proved
that--and he, the man, had fallen at Chickamauga, taking his death in
front like a soldier; and surely that settled everything and made all
things right! But the letter--that was the main thing. His old blue eyes
skipped nimbly behind the glasses that saddled the tip of his plump pink
nose, and the old judge read it--just such a letter as he himself had
received many a time; just such a wartime letter as uncounted thousands
of soldiers North and South received from their sweethearts and read and
reread by the light of flickering campfires and carried afterward in
their knapsacks through weary miles of marching.

It was crammed with the small-town gossip of a small town that was but
little more than a memory now--telling how, because he would not
volunteer, a hapless youth