My reader must be told that, before the war broke out, this enthusiastic girl had flitted across the path of Arthur Butler, then a youth of rare faculty and promise, who combined with a gentle and modest demeanor an earnest devotion to his country, sustained by a chivalrous tone of honor that had in it all the fanciful disinterestedness of boyhood. It will not, therefore, appear wonderful that, amongst the golden opinions the young man was storing up in all quarters, some fragments of this grace should have made a lodgment in the heart of Mildred Lindsay. Butler was a native of one of the lower districts of South Carolina, and was already the possessor, by inheritance, of what was then called a handsome fortune. He first met Mildred, under the safe-conduct of her parents, at Annapolis in Maryland, at that time the seat of opulence and fashion. There the wise and the gay, the beautiful and the rarely-gifted united in a splendid little constellation, in which wealth threw its sun-beam glitter over the wings of love, and learning and eloquence were warmed by the smiles of fair women: there gallant men gave the fascinations of wit to a festive circle unsurpassed in the new world, or the old, for its proportion of the graces that embellish, and the endowments that enrich life. In this circle there was no budding beauty of softer charm than the young Mildred, nor was there amongst the gay and bright cavaliers that thronged the "little academy" of Eden, (the governor of the province,) a youth of more favorable omen than Arthur Butler. The war was at the very threshold, and angry men thought of turning the ploughshare into the sword. Amongst these was Butler; an unsparing denouncer of the policy of Britain, and an unhesitating volunteer in the ranks of her opposers. It was at this eventful time that he met Mildred. I need hardly add that under these inauspicious circumstances they began to love. Every interview afterwards (and they frequently saw each other at Williamsburg and Richmond) only developed more completely the tale of love that nature was telling in the heart of each.