The moral reflection, not arrived at so easily or so rapidly as the reader can imagine, concluded Tony's letter, to which in due time came a long answer from his mother. With the home gossip we shall not burden the reader, nor shall we ask of him to go through the short summary--four close pages--of the doctor's discourses on the text, “I would ye were hot or cold,” two sensations that certainly the mere sight of the exposition occasioned to Tony. We limit ourselves to the words of the postscript. “I cannot understand Dolly at all, and I am afraid to mislead you as to what you ask. My impression is--but mind, it is mere impression--she has grown somewhat out of her old friendship for you. Some stories possibly have represented you in a wrong light, and I half think you may be right, and that she would be less averse to the marriage if she knew you were not to be in the house with them. It was, indeed, only this morning the doctor said, 'Young married folk should aye learn each other's failings without bystanders to observe them,'--a significant hint I thought I would write to you by this post.” When Tony received his epistle, he was seated in his own room, leisurely engaged in deciphering a paragraph in an Italian newspaper, descriptive of Garibaldi's departure from a little bay near Genoa to his Sicilian expedition. Nothing short of a letter from his mother could have withdrawn his attention from a description so full of intense interest to him; and partly, indeed, from this cause, and partly from the hard labor of rendering the foreign language, the details stuck in his mind during all the time he was reading his mother's words. “So that 's the secret, is it?” muttered he. “Dolly wishes to be alone with her husband,--natural enough; and I'm not the man to oppose it. I hope she'll be happy, poor girl; and I hope Garibaldi will beat the Neapolitans. I 'm sure Sam is worthy of a good wife; but I don't know whether these Sicilian fellows deserve a better government. At all events, my course is clear,--here I mustn't stay. Sam does not know that I am the obstacle to his marriage; but _I_ know it, and that is enough. I wonder would Garibaldi take me as a volunteer? There cannot be much choice at such a time. I suppose he enrolls whoever offers; and they must be mostly fellows of my own sort,--useless dogs, that are only fit to give and take hard knocks.” He hesitated long whether he should tell Sam M'Gruder of his project; he well knew all the opposition he should meet, and how stoutly his friend would set himself against a plan so fatal to all habits of patient industry. “And yet,” muttered Tony to himself, “I don't like to tell him that I hate 'rags,' and detest the whole business. It would be so ungrateful of me. I could say my mother wanted to see me in Ireland; but I never told him a lie, and I can't bear that our parting should be sealed with a falsehood.”