Then came the war.  Although it divided the two friends, the old kindness kept their difference from flaming forth in the vendetta fashion peculiar to the region.  It was a great deal that these two young fellows did not believe that military morality required them to shoot each other on sight.  Yet, on reconsideration, I will not be so sure of their opinion on this point.  Perhaps they thought that, morally and patriotically, they ought to do this, and were conscious of weakness and failure of duty in omitting to do it.  Perhaps the old good-will survived for the girl’s sake; and if so, I do not think the Union was the worse preserved on that account.

The young lover went into the ranks of Wolford’s regiment of loyal mountaineers, and rose—­slowly at first, more rapidly as his square sense and upright character became known.

The girl, in her retirement, heard of her lover’s advancement with pride and fear.  She distrusted her worth, and found the hard menial duties of life more irksome than before.  Not that she shrank from labor, but she feared its unfitting her for the refinement required by her lover’s new social position.  She had few examples to teach her the small proprieties of small minds, but a native delicacy helped her more than she was conscious of.  She read her Bible a great deal, and used to wonder if Mary and “the other Mary” were ladies.  She thought Peter was probably an East Tennesseean, or like one, for when he denied his Lord they said he did not talk like the others.  It seemed hard that to say “we-uns” and “you-uns,” as she habitually did, though she tried not, and to use the simple phrases of her childhood, should be thought coarse or wrong.  Such matters were puzzles to her which she could not solve.  She got an old thumbed Butler’s Grammar and tried hard to correct the vocables of her truant tongue.  I am afraid she made poor progress.  She had a way of defying that intolerable tyrant, the nominative singular, and put all her verbs in the plural, under an impression, not without example, that it was elegant language.  She had enough hard work to do, poor girl! to have been quit of these mental troubles.  Her brother was away, her parents were old, and all the irksome duties of farm-house and garden fell upon her.  She had to hunt the wild shoats on the range, and to herd them; to drive up the cows, and milk them; to churn and make the butter and cheese.  She tapped the sugar trees and watched the kettles, and made the maple syrup and sugar; she tended the poultry, ploughed and hoed the corn field and garden, besides doing the house-work.  Her old parents could help but little, for the “rheumatiz,” which attacks age in the mountains, had cramped and knotted their limbs, and they were fit for nothing except in fine dry weather.  Surely, life was hard with her, without her anxieties about her lover’s constancy and her own defects.  Letter-writing was a labor not to be thought of.  She tried it, and got as far