It was over in ten minutes more, and Doubledick returned to the spot where he had laid the best friend man ever had on a coat spread upon the wet clay.  Major Taunton’s uniform was opened at the breast, and on his shirt were three little spots of blood.

“Dear Doubledick,” said he, “I am dying.”

“For the love of Heaven, no!” exclaimed the other, kneeling down beside him, and passing his arm round his neck to raise his head.  “Taunton!  My preserver, my guardian angel, my witness!  Dearest, truest, kindest of human beings!  Taunton!  For God’s sake!”

The bright, dark eyes—­so very, very dark now, in the pale face—­smiled upon him; and the hand he had kissed thirteen years ago laid itself fondly on his breast.

“Write to my mother.  You will see Home again.  Tell her how we became friends.  It will comfort her, as it comforts me.”

He spoke no more, but faintly signed for a moment towards his hair as it fluttered in the wind.  The Ensign understood him.  He smiled again when he saw that, and, gently turning his face over on the supporting arm as if for rest, died, with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived a soul.

No dry eye looked on Ensign Richard Doubledick that melancholy day.  He buried his friend on the field, and became a lone, bereaved man.  Beyond his duty he appeared to have but two remaining cares in life,—­one, to preserve the little packet of hair he was to give to Taunton’s mother; the other, to encounter that French officer who had rallied the men under whose fire Taunton fell.  A new legend now began to circulate among our troops; and it was, that when he and the French officer came face to face once more, there would be weeping in France.

The war went on—­and through it went the exact picture of the French officer on the one side, and the bodily reality upon the other—­until the Battle of Toulouse was fought.  In the returns sent home appeared these words:  “Severely wounded, but not dangerously, Lieutenant Richard Doubledick.”

At Midsummer-time, in the year eighteen hundred and fourteen, Lieutenant Richard Doubledick, now a browned soldier, seven-and-thirty years of age, came home to England invalided.  He brought the hair with him, near his heart.  Many a French officer had he seen since that day; many a dreadful night, in searching with men and lanterns for his wounded, had he relieved French officers lying disabled; but the mental picture and the reality had never come together.

Though he was weak and suffered pain, he lost not an hour in getting down to Frome in Somersetshire, where Taunton’s mother lived.  In the sweet, compassionate words that naturally present themselves to the mind to-night, “he was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.”

It was a Sunday evening, and the lady sat at her quiet garden-window, reading the Bible; reading to herself, in a trembling voice, that very passage in it, as I have heard him tell.  He heard the words:  “Young man, I say unto thee, arise!”