change, adventure, anything to take him out of his past, he enlisted in the cavalry, and was speedily drafted to the ——­th, which was just starting forth on a stirring summer campaign.  He was a fine horseman, a fine shot, a man who instantly attracted the notice of his officers:  the campaign was full of danger, adventure, rapid and constant marching, and before he knew it or dreamed it possible he had become deeply interested in his new life.  Only in the monotony of a month or two in garrison that winter did the service seem intolerable.  His comrades were rough, in the main, but thoroughly good-hearted, and he soon won their esteem.  The spring sent them again into the field; another stirring campaign, and here he won his stripes, and words of praise from the lips of a veteran general officer, as well as the promise of future reward; and then the love of soldierly deeds and the thirst for soldierly renown took firm hold in his breast.  He began to turn towards the mother and father who had been wrapped up in his future,—­who loved him so devotedly.  He was forgetting his early and passionate love, and the bitter sorrow of her death was losing fast its poignant power to steel him against his kindred.  He knew they could not but be proud of the record he had made in the ranks of the gallant ——­th, and then he shrank and shivered when he recalled the dreadful words of his curse.  He had made up his mind to write, implore pardon for his hideous and unfilial language, and invoke their interest in his career, when, returning to Fort Raines for supplies, he picked up a New York paper in the reading-room and read the announcement of his father’s death, “whose health had been broken ever since the disappearance of his only son, two years before.”  The memory of his malediction had, indeed, come home to him, and he fell, stricken by a sudden and unaccountable blow.  It seemed as though his heart had given one wild leap, then stopped forever.  Things did not go so well after this.  He brooded over his words, and believed that an avenging God had launched the bolt that killed the father as punishment to the stubborn and recreant son.  He then bethought him of his mother, of pretty Alice, who had loved him so as a little girl.  He could not bring himself to write, but through inquiries he learned that the house was closed and that they had gone abroad.  He plodded on in his duties a trying year:  then came more lively field-work and reviving interest.  He was forgetting entirely the sting of his first great sorrow, and mourning gravely the gulf he had placed ’twixt him and his.  He thought time and again of his cruel words, and something began to whisper to him he must see that mother again at once, kiss her hand, and implore her forgiveness, or she, too, would be stricken suddenly.  He saved up his money, hoping that after the summer’s rifle-work at Sibley he might get a furlough and go East; and the night he arrived at the fort, tired with his long railway-journey and panting after a long and