mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and worn away forever! Sitting side by side, they talked--those bent and worn and gray old men--of scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men, even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless. It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washington commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened sheep,--and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge of faith of the Monmouth League--quivering yet with the anger which had brooded for more than fifty years,--as he pictured so plainly the burning of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead, the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by