eat at my own
table, and I be honored by it. There are many such noble spirits there,
and when I remember them, I wish to spare a land which I once hoped
might be burned with fire until no trace was left. We found them
everywhere, and especially among the mountains of Tennessee, where, but
for their timely aid, we had surely been recaptured. The negroes, too,
were powerful helps, and in no single case has a black man proved
treacherous to his suffering white brother, I was not an Abolitionist
when the war broke out, but I am one now, and to see the negro free I
would almost spill my last drop of blood. They are a patient,
all-enduring, faithful race, and without them the bones of many a poor
wretch who now sits by his own fireside and recounts the perils he has
escaped, would whiten in the Southern swamps or on the Southern
mountains. Three times were we chased by bloodhounds, and in every case
the negroes were the means of saving us from certain death. For weeks we
were hidden in a cave, hunted by the Confederates by day, and fed at
night by negroes, who told us when and where to go. With blistered feet
and bruised limbs, we reached the lines at last, when fever attacked me
for the second time and brought me near to death. Somebody wrote to you,
but you never received it, and when I grew better I would not let them
write again, as I wanted to surprise you. As soon as I was able I
started North, my thoughts full of the joyful meeting in store--a
meeting which I dreaded, too, for I knew you must think me dead, and I
felt so sorry for you, my darling, knowing, as I did, you would mourn
for your soldier husband. That my darling has mourned is written on her
face, and needs no words to tell it; but that is over now," Mark said,
folding his wife closer to him, and kissing the pale lips which
whispered:

"Yes, I have been so sorry, Mark--so tired, so sad, and life was such a
burden, I would gladly have laid it down."

"The burden is now removed," Mark said, and then he told her how,
arrived at Albany, he had telegraphed to his mother, asking where Helen
was.

"In Silverton," was the reply, and so he came on in the morning train,
meeting his mother in Springfield, as he had half expected to do,
knowing that she could leave New York in time to join him there.

"No words of mine," he said, "are adequate to describe the thrill of joy
with which I looked again upon the hills and rocks so identified with
you that I loved them