The sorrowful woman drew a long, shivering breath as she thought of the magnificent courage of that painful passing up San Juan Hill, wounded, crawling on, with a pluck that the shades of death could not dim.  Would she be proud of him?

The line for herself he had never written.  There was only the empty envelope lying alone in the box.  She turned it in her hand and saw it was addressed to the girl to whom he had been engaged.  Slowly it dawned on her that to every appearance this envelope belonged to the letter she had just read, his letter of the night before the battle.  She recoiled at the thought—­those last sacred words of his, to go to that empty-souled girl!  All that she would find in them would be a little fuel for her vanity, while the other—­she put her fingers on the irregular, back writing, and felt as if a strong young hand held hers again.  She would understand, that other; she had thought of his mother in the stress of her own strongest feeling; she had loved him for himself, not for vanity.  This letter was hers, the mother knew it.  And yet the envelope, with the other address, had lain just under it, and she had been his promised wife.  She could not face her boy in heaven if this last earthly wish of his should go wrong through her.  How could she read the boy’s mind now?  What was right to do?

The twilight fell over Crow Nest, and over the river and the heaped-up mountains that lie about West Point, and in the quiet room the boy’s mother sat perplexed, uncertain, his letter in her hands; yet with a vague sense of coming comfort in her heart as she thought of the girl who would surely “find her and be good to her,” But across the water, on the hillside, the boy lay quiet.

A MESSENGER

How oft do they their silver bowers leave, To come to succour us that succour want!  How oft do they with golden pineons cleave The flitting skyes, like flying Pursuivant, Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant!  They for us fight, they watch and dewly ward, And their bright Squadrons round about us plant; And all for love, and nothing for reward.  O!  Why should heavenly God to men have such regard?

    —­Spenser’s “Faerie Queene."

That the other world of our hope rests on no distant, shining star, but lies about us as an atmosphere, unseen yet near, is the belief of many.  The veil of material life shades earthly eyes, they say, from the glories in which we ever are.  But sometimes when the veil wears thin in mortal stress, or is caught away by a rushing, mighty wind of inspiration, the trembling human soul, so bared, so purified, may look down unimagined heavenly vistas, and messengers may steal across the shifting boundary, breathing hope and the air of a brighter world.  And of him who speaks his vision, men say “He is mad,” or “He has dreamed.”

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