The slight, naked chest of a fair-haired lad caught my eye, and dropping down beside him, I bent low to draw the remnant of his torn blouse about him, when with a quick cry he threw his left arm across my neck and, burying his face in the folds of my dress, wept like a child at his mother’s knee. I took his head in my hands and held it until his great burst of grief passed away. “And do you know me?” he asked at length; “I am Charley Hamilton who used to carry your satchel home from school!” My faithful pupil, poor Charley. That mangled right arm would never carry a satchel again. About three o’clock in the morning I observed a surgeon with his little flickering candle in hand approaching me with cautious step far up in the wood. “Lady,” he said as he drew near, “will you go with me? Out on the hills is a poor distressed lad, mortally wounded and dying. His piteous cries for his sister have touched all our hearts and none of us can relieve him, but rather seem to distress him by our presence.” By this time I was following him back over the bloody track, with great beseeching eyes of anguish on every side looking up into our faces saying so plainly, “Don’t step on us.” “He can’t last half an hour longer,” said the surgeon as we toiled on. “He is already quite cold, shot through the abdomen, a terrible wound.” By this time the cries became plainly audible to me. “Mary, Mary, sister Mary, come,--oh, come, I am wounded, Mary! I am shot. I am dying--oh, come to me--I have called you so long and my strength is almost gone--Don’t let me die here alone. Oh, Mary, Mary, come!” Of all the tones of entreaty to which I have listened--and certainly I have had some experience of sorrow--I think these, sounding through that dismal night, the most heart-rending. As we drew near, some twenty persons, attracted by his cries, had gathered around and stood with moistened eyes and helpless hands waiting the change which would relieve them all. And in the midst, stretched upon the ground, lay, scarcely full grown, a young man with a graceful head of hair, tangled and matted, thrown back from a forehead and a face of livid whiteness. His throat was bare. His hands, bloody, clasped his breast, his large, bewildered eyes turning anxiously in every direction. And ever from between his ashen lips pealed that piteous cry of “Mary! Mary! Come.” I approached him unobserved, and, motioning the lights away, I knelt by him alone in the darkness. Shall I confess that I intended if possible to cheat him out of his terrible death agony? But my lips were truer than my heart, and would not speak the word “Brother,” I had willed them to do. So I placed my hands upon his neck, kissed his cold forehead, and laid my cheek against his.