It had come to be a dwelling of comfortable aspect, cared for in the absence of the young couple by a thrifty hired housekeeper, a widowed cousin, and here they spent the off-seasons when the circus company went into winter quarters. Repairs had been instituted, several rooms were added, and a wide veranda replaced the rickety little porch and gave upon a noble prospect of mountain and valley and river. Here on sunshiny noons in the good Saint Martin's summer the old gran'dad loved to sit, blithe and hearty, chirping away the soft unseasonable December days. Sometimes in the plenitude of content he would give Valeria a meaning glance and mutter "Oh, leetle _Owel_! Oh, leetle _Owel_!" and then break into laughter that must needs pause to let him wipe his eyes. "Yes, Vallie 'pears ter hev right good sense an' makes out toler'ble well, considerin'," her husband would affably remark, "though of course it war _me_ ez interduced her ter the managers, an' she gits her main chance in the show through my bein' a celebrated ventriloquisk." THE LOST GUIDON Night came early. It might well seem that day had fled affrighted. The heavy masses of clouds, glooming low, which had gathered thicker and thicker, as if crowding to witness the catastrophe, had finally shaken asunder in the concussions of the air at the discharges of artillery, and now the direful rain, always sequence of the shock of battle, was steadily falling, falling, on the stricken field. Many a soldier who might have survived his wounds would succumb to exposure to the elements during the night, debarred the tardy succor that must needs await his turn. One of the surgeons at their hasty work at the field hospital, under the shelter of the cliffs on the slope, paused to note the presage of doom and death, and to draw a long breath before he adjusted himself anew to the grim duties of the scalpel in his hand. His face was set and haggard, less with a realization of the significance of the scene--for he was used to its recurrence--than simply with a physical reflection of horror, as if it were glassed in a mirror. A phenomenon that had earlier caught his attention in the landscape appealed again to his notice, perhaps because the symptom was not in his line. "Looks like a case of dementia," he observed to the senior surgeon, standing near at hand. The superior officer adjusted his field-glass. "Looks like 'Death on the White Horse'!" he responded.