I presume that this summer was the happiest period in the life of the Colonel. He was in fine health, thanks to his present temperate ways, although they reduced his weight so rapidly that his wife thought he was sick, and became alarmed about him. He frequently recommended marriage to Colburne, and they had long conversations on the subject; not, however, before Mrs. Carter, whose entrance always caused the Captain to drop the subject. The Telemachus was as fully persuaded of the benefits, happiness and duty of wedded life as the Mentor, and was much the best theorizer. "I believe," he said, "that neither man nor woman is a complete nature by himself or herself, and that you must unite the two in one before humanity is perfected, and, to use an Emersonianism, comes full circle. The union is affection, and the consecration of it is marriage. You remember Baron Munchausen's horse; how he was cut in two, and the halves got on very poorly without each other; and how they were reunited with mutual benefit. Now this is the history of every bachelor and single woman, who having miserably tried for a while to go it alone, finally coalesce happily in one flesh." "By Jove, Captain, you talk like a philosopher," said the Colonel. "You ought to write something. You ought to practice, too, according to your preaching. There is Mrs. Larue, now. No," he added seriously. "Don't take her. She isn't worthy of you. You deserve the best." Colburne was a better conversationalist than Carter, except in the way of small talk with comparative strangers, wherein the latter's confidence in himself, strengthened by habits of authority, gave him an easy freedom. Indeed, when Carter was actually brilliant in society, you might be sure he had taken five or six plain whiskeys, and that five or six more (what a head he sported!) would make him moderately drunk. If my readers will go back to the dinner at Professor Whitewood's, and the evening which followed it, and the next day's pic-nic when he was under the influence of a whiskey fever, they will see the best that he could do as a talker. With regard to subjects which implied ever so little scholarship, the Colonel accorded the Captain a facile admiration which at first astonished the latter. Talking one day of the earth-works of Port Hudson, Colburne observed that the Romans threw up field fortifications at the close of every day's march, one legion standing under arms to protect the workmen, while another marched out and formed line of battle to cover the foragers. If the brigade commander had ever known these things, he had evidently forgotten them. He looked at Colburne with undisguised astonishment, and set him down from that moment as a fellow of infinite erudition. This was far from being the only occasion on which the volunteer captain was led to notice the narrow professional basis from which most of the officers of the old service talked and thought. Now and then he met a philosopher like