" He lay in camp, chafing with impatience and
indignation as the long months wore away, and the thousands of graves
about Washington, filled by disease and inaction, made "all quiet along
the Potomac." He went down to Yorktown; was in the sweat and fury of the
seven days' fight; away in the far South, where fever and pestilence
stood guard to seize those who were spared by the bullet and bayonet;
and on many a field well lost or won. Through it all marching or
fighting, sick, wounded thrice and again; praised, admired, heroic,
promoted,--from private soldier to general,--through two years and more
of such fiery experience, no part of the tender love was burned away,
tarnished, or dimmed.
Sometimes, indeed, he even smiled at himself for the constant thought,
and felt that he must certainly be demented on this one point at least,
since it colored every impression of his life, and, in some shape,
thrust itself upon him at the most unseemly and foreign times.
One evening, when the mail for the division came in, looking over the
pile of letters, his eye was caught by one addressed to James Given. The
name was familiar,--that of his father's old foreman, whom he knew to be
somewhere in the army; doubtless the same man. Unquestionably, he
thought, that was the reason he was so attracted to it; but why he
should take up the delicate little missive, scan it again and again,
hold it in his hand with the same touch with which he would have pressed
a rare flower, and lay it down as reluctantly as he would have yielded a
known and visible treasure,--that was the mystery.
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