In the interval of noon-day rest allowed him, as well as the other convicts, I sate down beside him and entered into conversation with him. I found he was an old soldier. And at length, I was encouraged by his frankness to inquire the cause of the strange contrast between his expression and his circumstances. The veteran lifted his cap, and said mysteriously, "The King shall enjoy his own again. The spring will come, and with it the violets." The thought struck me that some harmless and happy insanity had risen, like a soft mist, to veil from him his miserable lot. And, following his train of thought, I said, "You wait for a king, and hope cheers you. Yet you must have waited long; and hope deferred maketh the heart sick." "The uncertainty of hope," he replied, "often makes the heart sick with fear of disappointment, but my hope is sure, and every day of delay certainly brings me nearer to it. Every night, as I look out from my convict's cell over the sea, before I lie down to sleep, I think before to-morrow the white sails of his fleet may stud the blue waters—for he will not return alone; and when morning dawns gray across the bare horizon, I am not cast down, because I know the morning we wait for will surely come at last." "But," I said, reverently, and half hesitating to disturb his happy dream, "when that morning dawns will you still be here?" "Here or there," he answered, solemnly. "Either with the few who look for him here, or with the countless multitudes who will accompany him thence." Knowing how such legends of the return of exiled princes linger in the hearts of a nation, and wondering whether the old man spoke from the delusion of his own peculiar madness or of a tradition current among his people, I said, "Your words are strange to me. Tell me the history." "After the great battle," the old soldier replied, a smile bright as a child's, yet tender as tears, lighting up his whole countenance—"after the last great battle, the King, the true King, our own King, has never been seen publicly in our country. They wounded him, and left him for dead on the field—they had wounded his heart to the core. Traitors were amongst them; it was not only an open enemy that did him this dishonour. But they were mistaken; he is not dead. We who loved him know. We bore him secretly from the field. He lingered a few days amongst us after his wounds had healed, in disguise; but although his royal state was hidden for a time, we who knew his voice, could tell him blindfold from a million. And since he left us, his faithful adherents, who before his departure could be counted by tens, have increased to thousands." "An unusual fortune," I remarked, "for a cause whose last effort seems generally to have been considered a defeat, and whose leader has apparently abandoned it."