In a few days the black in his hair withered to an ashen white.  His flesh fell away.  He could neither eat nor sleep.  He shambled through the obscure streets of Warchester, or lingered wistfully in the beech woods behind his own palatial home in Acredale, staring at the window of his daughter’s chamber.  The week passed in such mental torture as tries the strong when confronted by the major force of conscience.  Then the doctor told him that he had balked the plague; that Kate was recovering from varioloid; that beyond a transparency of skin, which would add to her beauty rather than impair it, there would be no sign of the attack.

Elisha Boone slept in his own home that night, and, for the first time in forty years, he fell upon his knees—­upon his knees!  Indeed, the doctor found him so at midnight, when he came with a request from his daughter to come to her room.  The doctor, with a word of warning against agitating the sufferer, wisely retired from the solemn reconciliation which, without knowing the circumstances, he knew was to take place between father and child.  She was propped up upon pillows whose texture her flesh rivaled in whiteness.  She opened her arms as the specter of what had been her father flew to her with a stifled cry.

“O father, we have both been wicked! we have both been punished!  Help me to do my part; help me to bear my burden.”

It was hope, mercy, and peace the meeting brought.  The next day Elisha Boone bade Kate a tender farewell.  She did not ask him where he was going.  She knew, and the light in her eye shone brighter as he rode in the darkness over the bare fields and through the sleeping towns to the capital, where Jack’s fate was hanging in the balance.  With Boone’s influence to aid them, Jack’s friends found a surprising change in the demeanor of the officials, hitherto captious and indifferent.  Boone himself laid the case before the President, omitting certain details not essential to the showing of the monstrous injustice done a brave soldier.  The President listened attentively, and with the expression, half sad and half droll, with which he softened the asperities of official life, said, humorously: 

“I wish by such simple means as courts-martial we could find out more such soldiers as this; we need all of that sort we can get.”  He touched a bell, and, when a clerk appeared in response, he said, “Ask General McClellan to come in for a moment before he leaves.”

What need to go into the details?  The court reconvened, and traversed the charges, which were disproved or withdrawn.  John Sprague was pronounced guiltless on every specification, and, on General McClellan’s recommendation, was promoted to a captaincy and assigned to the headquarters staff.  I might go on and tell of Jack’s daring on the Peninsula and his immeasurable usefulness to McClellan in the Williamsburg contest and the final wondrous change of base from the Chickahominy to the James; how his services were