ble, we give the name of history, that the
acts which he had in will would have marred the harmony of the pattern.
Some twenty-five years previously the Power charged with the execution
of the work according to the design had provided against that mischance
by causing the birth of a certain male child in a little village at the
foot of the Carpathian Mountains, had carefully reared it, supervised
its education, directed its desires into a military channel, and in due
time made it an officer of artillery. By the concurrence of an infinite
number of favoring influences and their preponderance over an infinite
number of opposing ones, this officer of artillery had been made to
commit a breach of discipline and flee from his native country to avoid
punishment. He had been directed to New Orleans (instead of New York),
where a recruiting officer awaited him on the wharf. He was enlisted and
promoted, and things were so ordered that he now commanded a Confederate
battery some two miles along the line from where Jerome Searing, the
Federal scout, stood cocking his rifle. Nothing had been neglected--at
every step in the progress of both these men's lives, and in the lives
of their contemporaries and ancestors, and in the lives of the
contemporaries of their ancestors, the right thing had been done to
bring about the desired result. Had anything in all this vast
concatenation been overlooked Private Searing might have fired on the
retreating Confederates that morning, and would perhaps have missed. As
it fell out, a Confederate captain of artillery, having nothing better
to do while awaiting his turn to pull out and be off, amused himself by
sighting a field-piece obliquely to his right at what he mistook for
some Federal officers on the crest of a hill, and discharged it. The
shot flew high of its mark.

As Jerome Searing drew back the hammer of his rifle and with his eyes
upon the distant Confederates considered where he could plant his shot
with the best hope of making a widow or an orphan or a childless
mother,--perhaps all three, for Private Searing, although he had
repeatedly refused promotion, was not without a certain kind of
ambition,--he heard a rushing sound in the air, like that made by the
wings of a great bird swooping down upon its prey. More quickly than he
could apprehend the gradation, it increased to a hoarse and horrible
roar, as the missile that made it sprang at him out of the sky, striking
with a deafening