ildren say, the truth, and long."

"It will be the truth, but not long. When the war broke out I was
twenty-eight years old, living with my mother on our farm in New
England. My father and two brothers had died and left me the homestead;
otherwise I should have broken away and sought fortune farther westward,
where the lands are better and life is more free. But mother loved the
house, the fields, and every crooked tree. She was alone, and so I staid
with her. In the center of the village green stood the square, white
meeting-house, and near by the small cottage where the pastor lived; the
minister's daughter, Mary, was my promised wife. Mary was a slender
little creature with a profusion of pale flaxen hair, large, serious
blue eyes, and small, delicate features; she was timid almost to a
fault; her voice was low and gentle. She was not eighteen, and we were
to wait a year. The war came, and I volunteered, of course, and marched
away; we wrote to each other often; my letters were full of the camp and
skirmishes; hers told of the village, how the widow Brown had fallen
ill, and how it was feared that Squire Stafford's boys were lapsing into
evil ways. Then came the day when my regiment marched to the field of
its slaughter, and soon after our shattered remnant went home. Mary
cried over me, and came out every day to the farmhouse with her bunches
of violets; she read aloud to me from her good little books, and I used
to lie and watch her profile bending over the page, with the light
falling on her flaxen hair low down against the small, white throat.
Then my wound healed, and I went again, this time for three years; and
Mary's father blessed me, and said that when peace came he would call me
son, but not before, for these were no times for marrying or giving in
marriage. He was a good man, a red-hot abolitionist, and a roaring lion
as regards temperance; but nature had made him so small in body that no
one was much frightened when he roared. I said that I went for three
years; but eight years have passed and I have never been back to the
village. First, mother died. Then Mary turned false. I sold the farm by
letter and lost the money three months afterward in an unfortunate
investment; my health failed. Like many another Northern soldier, I
remembered the healing climate of the South; its soft airs came back to
me when the snow lay deep on the fields and the sharp wind whistled
around the poor tavern where the moneyless,