"Do you remember at all how he looked?" Mrs. Lunt asked, for I could not speak. "The young officer? Yes, Madam, I looked keenly at him, you may be sure. He was tall and fine-looking, with dark, curling hair, and his regular features were smiling and peaceful. They mostly look so who are shot dead at once. And this one had not suffered. He had died at the moment of triumph." I went home to fear and to weep. It seemed too certain. And time brought us the truth. Robert had fallen as he would have chosen to fall, leading on his men. He was so tall, and he was such a shining mark for death! But I knew that no din of cannon or roar of battle was loud enough to overcome the still, small voices of home, and that his last thought was, as he wrote me it would be, "of you all." O beautiful, valiant youth! O fearful ploughshare, tearing thy way through so many bleeding hearts! O terrible throes, out of which a new nation must be born! IN THE HEMLOCKS. Most people receive with incredulity a statement of the number of birds that annually visit our climate. Very few even are aware of half the number that spend the summer in their own immediate vicinity. We little suspect, when we walk in the woods, whose privacy we are intruding upon,--what rare and elegant visitants from Mexico, from Central and South America, and from the islands of the sea, are holding their reunions in the branches over our heads, or pursuing their pleasure on the ground before us. I recall the altogether admirable and shining family which Thoreau dreamed he saw in the upper chambers of Spaulding's woods, which Spaulding did not know lived there, and which were not put out when Spaulding, whistling, drove his team through their lower halls. They did not go into society in the village; they were quite well; they had sons and daughters; they neither wove nor spun; there was a sound as of suppressed hilarity. I take it for granted that the forester was only saying a pretty thing of the birds, though I have observed that it does sometimes annoy them when Spaulding's cart rumbles through their house. Generally, however, they are as unconscious of Spaulding as Spaulding is of them.