vital heat, and burn down into our
souls to an answering fire. As we stand, on this soft summer day, by
the old tree which tradition declares to have witnessed that fateful
scene, we go back into a summer long ago, but fair, and just like this.
Jane McCrea is no longer a myth, but a young girl, blooming and
beautiful with the roses of her seventeen years. Farther back still,
we see an old man's darling, little Jenny of the Manse, a light-hearted
child, with sturdy Scotch blood leaping in her young veins,--then a
tender orphan, sheltered by a brother's care,--then a gentle maiden,
light-hearted no longer, heavy-freighted, rather, but with a priceless
burden,--a happy girl, to whom love calls with stronger voice than
brother's blood, stronger even than life. Yonder in the woods lurk
wily and wary foes. Death with unspeakable horrors lies in ambush
there; but yonder also stands the soldier lover, and possible greeting,
after long, weary absence, is there. What fear can master that
overpowering hope? Estrangement of families, political disagreement, a
separated loyalty, all melt away, are fused together in the warmth of
girlish love. Taxes, representation, what things are these to come
between two hearts? No Tory, no traitor is her lover, but her own
brave hero and true knight. Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad
war-whoops! alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or
loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold
flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch
the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but
with reverent half-touch,--and love and hope and life go out in one
dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of
more than fourscore years, through all the tempest-rage of a war more
awful than that, and fraught, we hope, with a grander joy, a clear,
young voice, made sharp with agony, rings through the shuddering woods,
cleaves up through the summer sky, and wakens in every heart a thrill
of speechless pain. Along these peaceful banks I see a bowed form
walking, youth in his years, but deeper furrows in his face than can
plough, stricken down from the heights of ambition and desire, all the
vigor and fire of manhood crushed and quenched beneath the horror of
one fearful memory.

Sweet summer sky, bending above us soft and saintly, beyond your blue
depths is there not Heaven?

"We may as well give Dobbin