"And you are a soldier, too! Ach Gott! ein offizier?" she exclaimed, in
consternation, born of German associations.

"Not yet, though I suppose I shall be very soon. What is your boy's
regiment?"

And, jabbering excitedly now, both at once, the two old people began
pouring their tale into his ears; told their boy's name,--"He was a
gorboral alretty,"--and they were justly proud, and Davies made them
happy by noting the name and company in his book and giving his own,
though he explained that he was not yet a lieutenant, only a
just-graduated cadet, but that if ever he found the corporal, he said,
he should tell him of his pleasant meeting with the old folks, and then,
after a cup of coffee at the restaurant counter, he returned to his own
thoughts and the car.

Soon they were spinning up along the shining Mohawk, and still his
eyelids would not close. In his waistcoat-pocket lay a bulky letter,
the last of many in the same superscription--a prim, unformed,
school-girlish hand--that had come to him during the last two years of
his cadet life. Its predecessors, carefully wrapped and tied, were in
the old trunk somewhere ahead among the baggage. In his hand again was
the telegram that, reaching him at the moment when he was bidding adieu
to the academic shades he had grown so deeply to love, had determined
him in the already half-formed resolution to cut loose from his comrades
and the class festivities in New York and take the first train for the
far West.

"URBANA, June 12.

"Doctor says come quick. Almira worse.

"B."

"B" was Almira's elder sister. Urbana, the home of his boy- and her
girlhood, the home where his father lived and died, pastor of the
village flock, a man whose devotion and patriotism during the great war
had won for himself the friendship of the leaders of the armies of the
West and for his only son, years afterwards, the prize of a cadetship at
West Point. Deeply religious in every fibre of his soul, the chaplain
had labored among the hospitals in the field from first to last, and
died not long after the close of the historic struggle, a martyr to the
cause. He died poor, too, as such men ever die, laying up no treasures
upon earth, where moth and rust and thieves are said to lessen treasure
there accumulated, yet where its accumulation seems the chief end of man
not spiritually constituted as was Davies, who was imposed upon by every
beat and beggar, tramp and drab, within rea