When we were little, and geography and history were but printed words on white paper, not places and events, Jane McCrea was to us no suffering woman, but a picture of a low-necked, long-skirted, scanty dress, long hair grasped by a naked Indian, and two unnatural-looking hands raised in entreaty. It was interesting as a picture, but it excited no pity, no horror, because it was only a picture. We never saw women dressed in that style. We knew that women did not take journeys through woods without bonnet or shawl, and we spread a veil of ignorant, indifferent incredulity over the whole. But as we grow up, printed words take on new life. The latent fire in them lights up and glows. The mystic words throb with vital heat, and burn down into our souls to an answering fire. As we stand, on this soft summer day, by the old tree which tradition declares to have witnessed that fateful scene, we go back into a summer long ago, but fair, and just like this. Jane McCrea is no longer a myth, but a young girl, blooming and beautiful with the roses of her seventeen years. Farther back still, we see an old man's darling, little Jenny of the Manse, a light-hearted child, with sturdy Scotch blood leaping in her young veins,--then a tender orphan, sheltered by a brother's care,--then a gentle maiden, light-hearted no longer, heavy-freighted, rather, but with a priceless burden,--a happy girl, to whom love calls with stronger voice than brother's blood, stronger even than life. Yonder in the woods lurk wily and wary foes. Death with unspeakable horrors lies in ambush there; but yonder also stands the soldier lover, and possible greeting, after long, weary absence, is there. What fear can master that overpowering hope? Estrangement of families, political disagreement, a separated loyalty, all melt away, are fused together in the warmth of girlish love. Taxes, representation, what things are these to come between two hearts? No Tory, no traitor is her lover, but her own brave hero and true knight. Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad war-whoops! alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but with reverent half-touch,--and love and hope and life go out in one dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of more than fourscore years, through all the tempest-rage of a war more awful than that, and fraught, we hope, with a grander joy, a clear, young voice, made sharp with agony, rings through the shuddering woods, cleaves up through the summer sky, and wakens in every heart a thrill of speechless pain. Along these peaceful banks I see a bowed form walking, youth in his years, but deeper furrows in his face than can plough, stricken down from the heights of ambition and desire, all the