He was just back from the front where he had been war correspondent during the heart of the Civil War, and he told me that he had a letter to give to me from a soldier in his division who had been shot. The soldier was mortally wounded when the reporter found him. He was lying at the foot of a tree at the point of death, and the correspondent asked if he could take any last messages for him to friends or relatives. The soldier asked him to write down a message to take to a woman whom he had loved for four years, but who did not know of his love. "Tell her," he said, speaking with great difficulty, "that I would not try even to meet her; but that I have loved her, before God, as well as any man ever loved a woman." He asked the reporter to feel inside his uniform for the woman's picture. "It is Miss Kellogg," he added, just before he died. "You--don't think that she will be offended if I send her this message--now--do you?" He asked the correspondent to draw his sabre and cut off a lock of hair to send to me, and the reporter wrote down the message on the only scraps of paper at his disposal--torn bits scribbled over with reports of the enemy's movements, and the names of other dead soldiers whose people must be notified when the battle was over. And then the soldier--my soldier--died; and the correspondent left him the picture and came away. The scribbled message and the lock of hair he put into my hands, saying: "He was very much worried lest you would think him presumptuous. I told him that I was sure you would not." I was weeping as he spoke, and so he left me. CHAPTER XXI ON THE ROAD