Imagine my great pride and joy, therefore, when this real live hero talked to me as familiarly as any schoolboy of my own age, and when, looking over some pictures of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, which were among my treasures, he told me how he had stormed the heights of Alma and captured Sebastopol, how he had relieved Lucknow, and blown thousands of mutinous Sepoys from the guns. I listened to him with all my sense and spirit. How graphically he described the fights, remembering every detail, even to the name of the little bugler who sounded the “cease firing,” and the exact expression of the Sepoys the moment before the guns were fired that should blow them to eternity! I drank it all in, and thought there never was such a great man in the world as Captain Marshall Meek. No wonder that his sweet and gentle wife cast such constant looks of affectionate pride upon him. She was indeed a fortunate woman to be the wife of such a hero, and I regarded her with boyish enthusiasm, because of her heroic husband’s reflected light. To me they were the most romantic couple I had ever met, for they embodied beauty and chivalry—such as I had read and dreamt of. They might have been Lancelot and Guinevere for me and they remained impressed upon my young memory, she as the beautiful daughter of a distinguished family, he as an ideal soldier, handsome and brave. I did not see them again till I had reached man’s estate, and then they came once more to my father’s house. But what a change had the years wrought! He was now a shaky, middle-aged man, with alternate intervals of boisterous merriment and ill-temper, and only the reminiscent suggestion of his old gallant bearing and good looks; while she was an absolute wreck of her former self. Her fair, plump features were now sallow and shrunk, her bright, gentle countenance told of nothing but sorrow, suffering, and anxiety; her full, elegant figure had become attenuated beyond recognition. The old regard of proud affection had given place to a haunted, restless look of fear, of expectancy of something terrible. Yes, a few years had transformed the gallant soldier into a confirmed drunkard and bully, and the poor wife into his abject slave.