Though, our lovers had resolved that nothing should exceed the regularity of their correspondence, and that the largest sheets of foolscap should be duly filled with all they could wish each other to say, in those days when regular mails, steamers, telegraphs, and penny postage were yet concealed in Time's capacious wallet, neither Emmy nor Charters had quite calculated upon the devious routes or the strange and wild districts into which the troops were to penetrate, or the chances of the Western war, with all its alternate glories and disasters. After a lapse of two long and weary months, by a sailing vessel poor Emmy received a letter from Louis, and, in the hushed silence of her own apartment, the humbled coquette wept over every word of it--and read it again and again--for it seemed to come like the beloved voice of the writer from a vast distance and from that land of danger. Then when she looked at the date and saw that it was a month--a whole month--ago, and when she thought of the new terrors each day brought forth, she trembled and her heart grew sick; then a paroxysm of tears was her only relief, for she was a creature of a nervous and highly excitable temperament. It described the long and dreary voyage to America in the crowded and comfortless transport--one thought ever in his soul--the thought of her; one scene ever around him--sea and sky. It detailed the hurried disembarkation and forced march of General Forbes's little army of 6200 soldiers from Philadelphia in the beginning of July, through a vast tract of country, little known to civilized men; all but impenetrable or impassable, as the roads were mere war paths, that lay through dense untrodden forests or deep morasses and over lofty mountains, where wild, active, and ferocious Indians, by musket, tomahawk, scalping-knife, and poisoned arrow, co-operated with the French in harassing our troops at every rood of the way. He told how many of the strongest and healthiest of Montgomery's Highlanders perished amid the toils and horrors they encountered; but how still he bore up, animated by the memory of her, by that love which was a second life to him, and by the darling hope that, with God's help, he would survive the campaign and all its miseries, and would find himself again, as of old, seated by the side of his beloved Emmy, with her cheek on his shoulder and her dear little hand clasped in his. He sent her some Indian beads, a few forget-me-nots that grew amid the grass within his tent; he sent her another lock of his hair, and prayed kind God to bless for the sake of the poor absent heart that loved her so well. And here ended this sorrowful letter, which was dated from the camp of the Scottish Brigadier, who halted at Raystown, ninety miles on the march from Fort du Quesne. Thus, by the time Emmy received it, the fort must have been attacked and lost or won.