“DEAR MOTHER: We’ve met the rascals, and been as genteelly licked as ever a pack of fools could ask to be. How it happened nobody knows. I was fitin’ like a tiger, when all on a sudden I found us a-runnin’ like a flock of sheep; and what is the queerest of all, is that while we were takin’ to our heels one way the Rebels were goin’ it t’other, and for what I know, we should of been runnin’ from each other till now if they hadn’t found out the game, and so turned upon us. “But wust of all is to come. _Hal_ is dead,—shot right through the forehead, and the ball that struck him down took off Ike Simmses cap, so if Ike had been only a little taller, Hal would of lived to been hung most likely.” “Oh, I wish he had, I wish he had!” poor Mrs. Baker moaned, still waving back and forth and kissing the lock of hair, while the widow involuntarily thanked her Heavenly Father that the two inches she once so earnestly coveted for her boy had wisely been withheld. Then followed Bill’s account of cutting away the hair he inclosed, of his flight into the woods, his sleep by the brook, and his waking just in time to see Capt. Carleton and Isaac Simms disappear beneath the trees, in charge of rebel soldiers. Now that she knew the worst the widow sat like one stunned by a heavy blow, uttering no sound, as Annie read Bill’s account of capturing his prisoner. Ere she reached this point, however, she had another auditor, Rose Mather, who had come with a second letter from her husband, and who, passing the weeping woman in the door, came and stood by Annie, and listened with strange interest to the story of that captive parting so willingly with everything save the picture. “Poor young man!” she sighed, when Annie finished reading. “I don’t suppose it’s right, but I _do_ feel sorry for him. What if it had been Jimmie? Perhaps he has a sister somewhere weeping for him just as I cried for Tom. Dear Tom, Will writes he is a prisoner with Isaac Simms. I’m glad they are together. Tom will take care of Isaac. He had a quantity of gold tied around his waist,” and Rose’s soft hand smoothed caressingly the widow’s thin, light hair. The widow had not wept before, but at the touch of those little fingers the flood gates opened wide, and her tears fell in torrents. They were bound together now by a common bond of sympathy, those four women, each so unlike to the other, and for a time they wept in silence, one for her wounded husband, one for a child deceased, one for a captured brother, the other for a son.