ll probably never be freed from it. But you see that I do not stick
so closely to the desk as to injure my health very much! And you--excuse
my asking the question," and he tried, walking at his side though he
was, to mark closely whether the question produced any effect on the
face of the other--"but the truth is, Ralston, that I scarcely expected
to meet you in the North at the present moment. I thought you so
incarnate a Southerner, as well as a slaveholder, that you would have
been likely to join in the rebellion!"

"No, did you?" asked Ralston; and if his face changed, certainly Leslie,
close observer as he thought himself, could not detect the difference.
"Well, I must say that you put the matter plainly. You _should_ have
thought better of an old friend, and remembered that if I was a
_Virginian_ I was also and still more an _American_."

How openly and with what apparent honesty the man spoke! And how
impossible it seemed that he _could_ be uttering other words than those
of entire truth? But Tom Leslie remembered the night under the arches of
the Capitol, the stars-and-bars and the mystic circlet of the house on
Prince Street, and the mysterious words that procured admission to the
house up-town; and he had seen and heard enough of double faces not to
be _too_ sure of his ground on any man's word.

"Well, I am glad to know it," he said, in reply to Ralston's disclaimer.
"We have not too many true Union men, who have _forgotten the particular
part of the Union in which they were born, for the sake of the country
and the whole country_. I am glad to know that you are one of them." He
laid peculiar stress on the more important words of the last sentence,
and bent his eyes still more searchingly on the countenance of the
singular man before him.

"How long do you remain?" asked Ralston, as they neared the end of the
bridge.

"A few days only," answered Leslie--"perhaps a week or two. I came up to
catch the moon on the Falls."

"You should have come in time, then, and seen the eclipse," said the
Virginian.

"Aha!" said Tom Leslie to himself. "One point of information gained, if
no more! He is a little in the _habit_ of being at Niagara, for he was
here at the full moon in June and he has since been absent! One touch
inside your armor, old fellow, if no more! You were here to see the
eclipse, then?" he asked aloud of Ralston. "I tried to come myself, but
could not manage it. What was it like, if you saw it ov