All that long delicious morning we were with him. In his tender charge we were permitted to go down among the tumult and the music of the streets, his round good-humored face and big blue eyes lit with a luster like our own. And happy little Mary Alice Smith--how proud she was of him! And how closely and how tenderly, through all that golden morning, did the strong brown hand clasp hers! A hundred times at least, as we promenaded thus, she swung her head back jauntily to whisper to us in that old mysterious way of hers that "David--Mason--Jeffries--and--Mary--Alice --Smith--knew--something--that--we--couldn't --guess!" But when he had returned us home, and after dinner had started down the street alone, with little Mary Alice clapping her hands after him above the gate and laughing in a strange new voice, and with the backs of her little fluttering hands vainly striving to blot out the big tear-drops that gathered in her eyes, we vaguely guessed the secret she and David kept. That night at supper-time we knew it fully. He had enlisted. . . . . . . . Among the list of "killed" at Rich Mountain, Virginia, occurred the name of "Jeffries, David M." We kept it from her as long as we could. At last she knew. . . . . . . . "It don't seem like no year ago to me!" Over and over she had said these words. The face was very pale and thin, and the eyes so bright--so bright! The kindly hand that smoothed away the little sufferer's hair trembled and dropped tenderly again upon the folded ones beneath the snowy spread. "Git me out the picture again!" The trembling hand lifted once more and searched beneath the pillow. She drew the thin hands up, and, smiling, pressed the pictured face against her lips. "David--Mason --Jeffries," she said--"le's--me--and--you--go-- play--out--on--the--stairs!" And ever in the empty home a voice goes moaning on and on, and "Where is Mary Alice?" it cries, and "Where--is--Mary--Alice--Smith?" And the still belated echo, through the high depths of the old hall overhead, answers quaveringly back, "Oh--she--has--gone--home!" But her voice-- it is silent evermore! "Oh, where is Mary Alice Smith?" She taught us how to call her thus--and now she will not answer us! Have we no voice to reach her with? How sweet and pure and glad they were in those old days, as we recall the accents ringing through the hall--the same we vainly cry to her. Her fancies were so quaint--her ways so full of prankish mysteries! We laughed then; now, upon our knees, we wring our lifted hands and gaze, through streaming tears, high up the stairs she used to climb in childish glee, to call and answer eerily. And now, no answer anywhere!