nry corporal or
deputy corporal. All this worked well for Arthur and Mildred.

Mr. Lindsay was not ignorant of Henry's popularity in the neighborhood,
nor how much he was petted by the volunteer soldiery. He did not object
to this, as it served to quiet suspicion of his own dislike to the
cause, and diverted the observation of the adherents of what he called
the rebel government, from his own motions; whilst, at the same time, he
deemed it no other than a gewgaw that played upon the boyish fancy of
Henry without reaching his principles.

Mildred, on the contrary, did not so regard it. She had inspired Henry
with her own sentiments, and now carefully trained him up to feel warmly
the interests of the war, and to prepare himself by discipline for the
hard life of a soldier. She early awakened in him a wish to render
service in the field, and a resolution to accomplish it as soon as the
occasion might arrive. Amongst other things, too, she taught him to love
Arthur Butler and keep his counsel.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MANSION OF A GENTLEMAN AND A SCHOLAR.

The site of the Dove Cote was eminently picturesque. It was an area of
level ground, containing, perhaps, two acres, on the summit of a hill
that, on one side, overhung the Rockfish river, and on the other rose by
a gentle sweep from the champaign country below. This summit might have
been as much as two hundred feet above the bed of the stream, and was
faced on that side by a bold, rocky precipice, not absolutely
perpendicular, but broken into stages or platforms, where grassy mould
had accumulated, and where the sweet-brier and the laurel, and clusters
of the azalea, shot up in profuse luxuriance. The fissures of the crag
had also collected their handful of soil and gave nourishment to
struggling vines, and everywhere the ash or pine, and not unfrequently
the dogwood, took possession of such spots upon the rocky wall, as these
adventurous and cliff-loving trees had found congenial to their nature.
The opposite or northern bank of the river had an equal elevation, and
jutted forward so near to the other as to leave between them a cleft,
which suggested the idea of some sudden abruption of the earth in those
early paroxysms that geologists have deemed necessary to account for
some of the features of our continent. Below was heard the ceaseless
brattle of the waters, as they ran over and amongst the rocks which
probably constituted the _debris_ formed in the convu