ds, his mind had cleared and his speech
returned, though feebly; but during all the two years his nervous
prostration had been increasing and his bodily strength declining, until
for weeks before that Sunday of July the physicians had pronounced him
gradually dying and expected him to drop away at any moment.

Such was half the picture presented at the end of the piazza, the other
half being made up of Colonel Egbert Crawford, his military coat changed
to a blouse of brown linen and his boots replaced by a pair of
embroidered slippers, but in all other regards quite as we have before
seen him, and altogether the legitimate commander of the Two Hundredth
Volunteers. During all his late visits to the farm, and especially since
the defection and ostracism of Richard, he had made his "strong point"
in paying great attention to the infirm old gentleman; and as personal
attention is always pleasant and flattering, and more particularly so to
the old, crippled, tedious and tiresome, he had succeeded in winning a
place in the old man's regard, by this course, which he might have
failed to secure by any other means.

On this particular morning he was rather well pleased than otherwise to
see Mary throw on her flat and run out to make a call on some one of the
neighbors, as this gave him an opportunity, on this his last day of
probation, of making himself very devoted to his prospective
father-in-law, without any serious drain upon his own personal comfort
and energy. To wait upon the old man, after he had been got up and
dressed for the morning and assisted out to the cool piazza, as in this
instance--consisted of very little more than answering the few words
which the invalid might happen to address him (and they were likely to
be very few),--brushing away a troublesome fly when the old man sunk
into a doze and the pest came too near his nose,--moving him a little if
the sun happened to become troublesome through the vines,--or picking up
and restoring a dropped handkerchief. The Colonel was rather well
pleased to have something to employ him in this manner on this
particular morning, especially when he could combine the employment
with a book and a lounge with his feet upon the piazza-railing; for the
house was a little ticklish for indiscriminate roaming about, owing to
the arrangements which he knew to be in progress. The dare-devil Major
Lally, of the French revolutionary time, is said to have laid his head
upon the block