It was grim news; and for a time it upset me completely. For a while the service which Marion had done me and Wilmer’s humanity were alike swept from my mind by a rush of anger. The resentment which such acts breed carried me away, as it had carried away better men before me. I cursed the rebels. I longed to strike a blow at them, I longed to crush them. I hated them. But what could I do, maimed and captive as I was? What could I do? Too soon the wave of anger passed and left behind it a depression, a despondency that the grey evening and the silent house deepened. I had escaped, I had been spared. But they, who might have been as helpless and as innocent as myself, and guilty only of owning the same allegiance, had suffered this! It was hard to think of the deed with patience, it was pain to think of it at all; and I was thankful when at last the night came, and I could turn my face to the wall and sleep. But no man is fit to be a soldier who cannot snatch the pleasures of the passing moment; and when the next day saw me out of doors, when I found myself established on the veranda and the view broke upon me, liquid with early sunshine, and my gaze travelled from the green slopes that fringed the farther bank of the creek to the wooded hills and so to the purple distances of the Blue Ridge—the boundary in those days of civilization—I felt that life was still worth living and worth preserving. From the house, which stood long and low on a modest bluff, a pasture, shaded by scattered catalpas, dropped down to the water, which a cattle track crossed under my eyes. On the left, in the direction of the smithy, the plantation fields lay along the slope, broken by clumps of live oaks and here and there disfigured by stumps. On the right a snake-fence, draped with branches of the grape-vine, enclosed an attempt at a garden, which a magnolia that climbed one end of the veranda and a fig tree that was splayed against the other, did something to reinforce. All under my eyes was rough and plain; the place differed from the stately mansions on the Ashley River or the Cooper, as Wilmer himself differed from the scarlet-coated, periwigged beaux of Charles Town, or as our home-farm in England differed from Osgodby itself. But a simple comfort marked the homestead, the prospect was entrancing, and what was still new and crude in the externals of the house, the beauty of a semi-tropical vegetation was hastening to veil. At a glance one saw that the Bluff was one of those up-country settlements which men of more enterprise than means were at this time pushing over the hills towards the Tennessee and the Ohio.