daring courage had well-nigh won for Maddy a widow’s heritage. For the present the arm is disabled, and so he has been discharged, and comes back to the home where warm words of welcome greet him, from the lowest servant up to his darling wife, who can only look her joy as he folds her in his well arm, and kisses her beautiful face. Only Margaret Holbrook seems a little sad, she had so wanted her husband to come with Guy, but his humanity would not permit him to leave the suffering beings who needed his care. Loving messages he sent to her, and her tears were dried when she heard from Guy how greatly he was beloved by the pale occupants of the beds of pain, and how much he was doing to relieve their anguish. Jessie, grown to be a most beautiful girl of nearly sixteen, is still a child in actions, and wild with delight at seeing her brother again, throws her arms around his neck, telling, in almost the same breath, how proud she is of him, how much she wished to go to him when she heard he was wounded, how she wishes she was a boy, so she could enlist, how nicely Flora is married and settled down at the cottage in Honedale, and then asks if he knows aught of the rebel colonel to whom just before the war broke out her mother was married, and whose home was in Richmond. Guy knows nothing of him, except that he is still doing what he deems his duty in fighting for the Confederacy, but from exchanged prisoners, who had come up from Richmond, he has heard of a beautiful lady, an officer’s wife, and as rumor said, a Northern woman, who visited them in prison, speaking kind words of sympathy, and once binding up a drummer boy’s aching head with a handkerchief, which he still retained, and on whose corner could be faintly traced the name of “Agnes Remington.” Jessie’s eyes are full of tears as she says: “Poor mamma, how glad I am I did not go to Virginia with her. It’s months since I heard from her direct. Of course it was she who was so good to the drummer boy. She cannot be much of a rebel,” and Jessie glances triumphantly at Mrs. Noah, who, never having quite overcome her dislike of Agnes, had sorely tried Jessie by declaring that her mother “had found her level at last, and was just where she wanted to be.” Good Mrs. Noah, the ancient man whose name she bore would as soon have thought of leaving the Ark as she of turning a traitor to her country, and when she heard of the riotous mob raised against the draft, she talked seriously of going in person to New York “to give ’em a piece of her mind,” and for one whole day refused to speak to Flora’s husband, because he was a “dum dimocrat,” and she presumed was opposed to Lincoln. With the exception of Maddy, no one was more pleased to see Guy than herself. He was her boy, the one she brought up, and with all a mother’s fervor she kissed his bronzed cheek, and told him how glad she was to have him back.