“These are all of them you are to see,” laughed Peg, stoutly, referring to her tears. “I promise to shed no more. However, you may quiet alarm; a woman's tears are no such mighty matter.” I showed perturbation, I suppose, and she would dissipate it. Peg told me of her wedding with Eaton. She dwelt a deal on her love for him; but since one consents to it as a sentiment, even though its cause defy one's search, there comes no call to extend the details in this place. It stood open to my eyes, however, as Peg talked, how no man was more loved than Eaton. And when I looked upon the ardent girl and considered, withal, the dull stolidity of the other, there would rise up pictures from my roving past to be as allegories of Peg's love. I would recall how once I saw a vine, blossom-flecked and beautiful, flinging its green tenderness across a hard insensate wall; and that was like Peg's love. Or it would come before me how I had known a mountain, sterile, seamed, unlovely, where it heaved itself against the heavens, a repellant harsh shoulder of stone. The June day, fresh and new and beautiful, would blush in the east, and her first kiss was for that cold gray, rude, old rock. That day at noon in her warm ripeness would rest upon it. Her latest glance, as our day died in the west, was for it; and when the valley and all about were dark, her last rays crowned it. And the vivid day, with her love for that unregardful mountain, the rich day wasting herself on the desert peak that would neither respond nor understand, was as the marvel of Peg's love. It is all the mystery that never ends; woman in her love-reasons is not to be fathomed nor made plain. The cry of her soul is to love rather than to be loved; her happiness lives in what she gives, not what she gets. This turns for the good fortunes of men; also, it offers the frequent spectacle of a woman squandering herself--for squandering it is--on one so unworthy that only the sorrow of it may serve to smother the laughter that else might be evoked. However, I am not one to discuss these things, being no analyst, but only a creature of bluff wits, too clumsy for theories as subtle, not to say as brittle, as spun glass. Wherefore, let us put aside Peg's love and break off prosing. The more, since I may otherwise give some value to a jest of the General's--made on that same day--who would have it I was at first sight half in love with Peg myself. This was the General's conception of humor ard owned no other currency--I, being twice Peg's age, and in the middle forties, and not a trifle battered of feature by my years in the field. I was old enough to be Peg's father;--but when it comes to that, Eaton was quite as old.