ying to ravel out mysteries, and to explain things that no mortal
man has ever yet understood. One night very late we were talking, and
grew much excited; and we promised each other solemnly that the one
who died first would appear to the other, if such a thing were
possible, and would at least warn him in a way that should be
unmistakable of his death. We were half in fun and half in earnest,
God forgive us! and we made that awful promise to each other. Then we
went into the army, and I don't remember thinking of it once until the
very night before he was killed. We were sitting together under a
tree, after a hard day's fight, and Dunster said to me, laughing, 'Do
you remember we promised each other, that whoever died first would
appear to the other, and follow him?' I laughed,--you know how
reckless we were in those days when death and dying were so horribly
familiar,--and I said the same shell might kill us both, which would
be a great pity. We were very merry and foolish; and I should have
said Henry had been drinking, but there had been nothing to drink and
hardly any thing to eat: you remember we were cut off from our
supplies, and the men had very little in their haversacks. Next day
the fight was hotter than ever, and we were being driven back, when I
saw him toss up his hands, and fall. He must have been trodden to
death at any rate. When we regained that little field beyond the woods
some days afterward, they had dragged off the wounded, and buried the
dead in shallow trenches. I knew Dunster was dead; and I stood on
picket near a trench which was just about where he fell, and I cried
in the dark like a girl. I loved Dunster. You know he was the only
near relative I had in the world whom I cared any thing for, and ours
wasn't a bonfire friendship. He had his faults, I know he wasn't liked
in the class. He was a brilliant fellow; but I used to be afraid he
might go to the bad. Do you remember that night, Ainslie? The men were
so tired that they had dropped down anywhere in the mud to sleep, and
there was some kind of a bird in the woods that gave a lonely, awful
cry once in a while."

"I remember it," said my brother, moving uneasily in his chair, and
this time I had to look behind me, there was no help for it.

"I went to the hospital soon after that," Mr. Whiston said next. "I
was not badly wounded at all, but the exposure in that rainy weather
played the mischief with me, and I was discharged, and, before y