He came to me but an hour since, decked in his uniform (a lamb decked for the slaughter). 'I'm a lieutenant now,' he said, tapping his shoulder gaily; 'I shall rival Sam Patch at a leap, and jump to the head at once. Three months is enough to make a colonel of me.' And so, with his young heart beating high and warm, upborne by wild hopes like these, he held me to his heart at parting, and went away quite joyously, my poor darling! shedding only a few tears in sympathy with mine. I watch his form until I lose it in the mass before me; then I watch the mass moving slowly, slowly on, bearing him away from me; till the heavy tramp dies out upon the air, and the dark mass, growing less and less, becomes a dim speck in the distance; and the music wanes, and wanes, and dies out also, and in the still air about me only the voice of the wind is heard: coming and going at long, lazy intervals, it speaks to my inner sense with a warning note, a low requiem sound. Why is it that it takes that weird tone always when sorrow is darkly waiting for me in the future? What prophet's voice speaks to me in it? What invisible thing without addresses its wild warning to the invisible within? As I listened, my soul grew chill and dark with the shadow of a coming gloom; my heart grew cold. God help me! How wildly, how almost despairingly I prayed for my darling's life! Alone in the world, we were all in all to each other. Mine was a wild, exclusive love. Heart and soul were bound up in him. Other girls had their lovers; my fond heart beat for him alone. What tie nearer and dearer than the tie of blood united us? What bond, sacred and invisible, bound our souls together? I know not; I only know that my heart and mind echoed always the thoughts and moods of his; that, no matter what dreary distance lay between us, our souls held communication still; that I rejoiced when he was glad; and wept when I said, 'He is sorrowful to-day.' He had gone away gay and hopeful, and had left me weeping--oppressed by vague fears and chill forebodings, my heart could not echo _now_ the happy mood of his. Wild and weird, all that dreary day, the wind moaned its warning; and the sad echo sounded through other dreary days that followed this; and dreary nights came also, when I prayed and wept, and covered the pictured face with tears and kisses--when I cried, 'God keep my precious one, and bring my darling back to me;' and that was all my prayer;--when I sank to fitful slumbers, and wildly dreamed of shell and cannon ball, and bullets thick as hail, of foes met in deadly fray, of shielding my darling's form with mine--there, where all was smoke and darkness and blood and horror--and dying gladly in his stead. Or the scene changed from horror to desolation, and, with a dreadful sense of isolation on me, alone in the darkness I wandered up and down, blindly searching for him I never found; or finding him, perhaps, covered with ghastly wounds, and dead,