those fierce moments of the bitterness of defeat. Life suddenly
had a new meaning, a fair and fragrant promise, and often and again he
looked over his shoulder at the receding scene when the trumpets sang
"to horse," and in the light of the moon the guerilla rode out of
Tanglefoot Cove.

But Ethelinda saw him never again. All the storms of fate overwhelmed
the Confederacy with many a rootless hope and many a plan and pride. In
lieu of the materialization of the stalwart ambition of distinction that
had come to dominate his life, responsive to the discovery of his
peculiar and inherent gifts, his destiny was chronicled in scarce a line
of the printed details of a day freighted with the monstrous disaster of
a great battle; in common with others of the "missing" his bones were
picked by the vultures till shoved into a trench, where a monument
rises to-day to commemorate an event and not a commander. Nevertheless,
for many years the flare of the first red leaves in the cleft among the
pines on the eastern slope of Tanglefoot Cove brought to Ethelinda's
mind the gay flutter of the guidon, and in certain sonorous blasts of
the mountain wind she could hear martial echoes of the trumpets of the
guerilla.

WHO CROSSES STORM MOUNTAIN?

The wind stirred in the weighted pines; the snow lay on the ground. Here
and there on its smooth, white expanse footprints betokened the woodland
gentry abroad. In the pallid glister of the moon, even amid the sparse,
bluish shadows of the leafless trees, one might discriminate the
impression of the pronged claw of the wild turkey, the short, swift
paces of the mink, the padded, doglike paw of the wolf. A progress of a
yet more ravening suggestion was intimated in great hoofmarks leading to
the door of a little log cabin all a-crouch in the grim grip of winter
and loneliness and poverty on the slope of the mountain, among heavy,
outcropping ledges of rock and beetling, overhanging crags. With icy
ranges all around as far as the eye could reach, with the vast,
instarred, dark sky above, it might seem as if sorrow, the world, the
law could hardly take account of so slight a thing, so remote. But smoke
was slowly stealing up from its stick-and-clay chimney, and its
clapboarded roof sheltered a group with scarcely the heart to mend the
fire.

Two women shivered on the broad hearth before the dispirited embers. One
had wept so profusely that she had much ado to find a dry spot in her
blue-