"As soon as we had read the letter we went off and spent all our savings in tobacco. That was the only cheap thing in Richmond in those days, and we got enough to last Jim for months, though I have no doubt that he at once gave most of it away. Then we got some paper, and wrote him all we knew of the Harvard men on our side of the fence. We could give an equally good account of them, too; for though, as disobedient children, Alma Mater has frowned on us, she never had cause to blush. We finished the letter before it was time for us to go back to camp, and sent it with the tobacco to Jim. We promised to try again to see him, but neither of us could get leave for a long time. If we had there would have been little chance of our getting into Libby; and if we had gotten into Libby, we should not have found Jim there." As the speaker paused Stoughton asked, "Why? did he es----" and then stopped, inwardly cursing himself, as he noticed a look that was coming into the face of the narrator. But the latter at once relieved him immensely by continuing. "Yes, he escaped--very soon after our visit. A lot of prisoners got out together, Jim among them. The news was sent to all the troops near Richmond and instructions to keep a sharp lookout for them. Jim managed to get to our very outer lines, and one pitch-dark night tried to run the picket. The officer in command saw him in the brush and challenged him. Jim, trusting to the darkness and his old hundred-yard records, tried to make a dash for it. The officer fired and shot--shot him down like a dog." The speaker's cigar had apparently gone out, and no one looked at him while he relit it. They looked at the walls where the firelight danced over the rollicking play-bills of thirty years ago. In a moment the graduate spoke again: "As I leaned over the dearest friend I ever had, we recognized each other and he smiled. I took his head in my lap and he died holding my hand." "Then you saw him before he died? Were you with the picket?" asked Gray. "Yes.--I commanded the picket." LITTLE HELPING HANDS. It was all the result of a violent discussion in Stoughton's room. Hudson held that four miles an hour was an easy walking gait; Stoughton and Gray said it wasn't. "I tell you," said the latter, "when you are doing better than three and a half, you are hitting it up pretty well, and you couldn't keep it up for any length of time. Don't you remember, Dick, we timed ourselves when we walked out from Boston the other night? It took us fifty minutes from the corner of Charles and Cambridge Streets, and that is just about three miles." "Yes, and we went at a pretty good pace too," added Stoughton. "That was probably after a supper at Billy Parks'," Hudson explained; "under those circumstances you undoubtedly covered a great many more miles than the crow flies between here and Boston."