Our readers may, ere this, have surmised that Frank Dalton's career as a soldier was neither very adventurous nor exciting, since otherwise we should scarcely have so nearly forgotten him. When he parted with Hanserl to pursue his journey, his heart was full of warring and conflicting emotions, love of home and hope of future distinction alternately swaying him; so that while his affections drew him ever backwards, his ambitious urged him to go on. “I could have been so happy to have lived with them,” thought he, “even as a peasant lives, a life of daily toil. I would have asked for no higher fortune than that peaceful home we had made for ourselves by our own affections, the happy fireside, that sufficed us for all the blandishments of wealth and riches. Still there would have been something ignoble in this humility, something that would ill become my blood as a Dalton. It was not thus my ancestors understood their station, it was not with such lowly ambitions their hearts were stirred. Count Stephen himself might at this hour have been in obscurity and poverty as great, perhaps, as our own had he been thus minded; and now he is a field-marshal, with a 'Maria Teresa' cross on his breast! and this without one friend to counsel or to aid him! What a noble service is that where merit can win its way self-sustained and independent, where, without the indignity of a patron, the path of honorable enterprise lies free and open to all! What generous promptings, what bold aspirations such a career engenders! He shall not be ashamed of me, he shall not have to blush for the Dalton blood,” said the boy, enthusiastically; and he revelled in a dream of the old Count's ecstasy on finding a nephew so worthy of their name, and in his fancy he saw pictures of future scenes in which he figured. All of these had the same rose tint; for while in some he imagined himself winning the high rewards of great achievements, in others he was the caressed and flattered guest of rank and beauty. “To think that I should once have been thus!” cried he, laughing at the conceit, “trudging along the high-road with a knapsack on my shoulder, like a Bursch in his 'Wander-jahre;'” and then he vowed to himself that “he would have a picture taken of his humble guise as first he started in life, to hang up at some future day beside the decorated soldier he was yet to be.”