ided, but it could not, so it was carried
away into the strange country, and the world of William knew it no more
forever. Yet still through the aftertime of his loneliness its song
filled all the dream, and seemed always sounding in his ear and in his
heart.

The kinsmen who had adopted the boys were enemies, holding no
communication. For a time letters full of boyish bravado and boastful
narratives of the new and larger experience--grotesque descriptions of
their widening lives and the new worlds they had conquered--passed
between them; but these gradually became less frequent, and with
William's removal to another and greater city ceased altogether. But
ever through it all ran the song of the mocking-bird, and when the
dreamer opened his eyes and stared through the vistas of the pine forest
the cessation of its music first apprised him that he was awake.

The sun was low and red in the west; the level rays projected from the
trunk of each giant pine a wall of shadow traversing the golden haze to
eastward until light and shade were blended in undistinguishable blue.

Private Grayrock rose to his feet, looked cautiously about him,
shouldered his rifle and set off toward camp. He had gone perhaps a
half-mile, and was passing a thicket of laurel, when a bird rose from
the midst of it and perching on the branch of a tree above, poured from
its joyous breast so inexhaustible floods of song as but one of all
God's creatures can utter in His praise. There was little in that--it
was only to open the bill and breathe; yet the man stopped as if struck
--stopped and let fall his rifle, looked upward at the bird, covered his
eyes with his hands and wept like a child! For the moment he was,
indeed, a child, in spirit and in memory, dwelling again by the great
river, over-against the Enchanted Land! Then with an effort of the will
he pulled himself together, picked up his weapon and audibly damning
himself for an idiot strode on. Passing an opening that reached into the
heart of the little thicket he looked in, and there, supine upon the
earth, its arms all abroad, its gray uniform stained with a single spot
of blood upon the breast, its white face turned sharply upward and
backward, lay the image of himself!--the body of John Grayrock, dead of
a gunshot wound, and still warm! He had found his man.

As the unfortunate soldier knelt beside that masterwork of civil war the
shrilling bird upon the bough overhead stilled her song an