2 files changed, 6592 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/lddnb10.txt b/old/lddnb10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cad436a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/lddnb10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6592 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aladdin O'Brien, by Gouverneur Morris
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Aladdin O'Brien
+
+Author: Gouverneur Morris
+
+Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5172]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 29, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALADDIN O'BRIEN ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ALADDIN O'BRIEN
+
+BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+    "It was many and many a year ago,
+      In a kingdom by the sea,
+    That a maiden there lived whom you may know
+      By the name of Annabel Lee.
+    And this maiden she lived with no other thought
+      Than to love and be loved by me.
+    I was a child and she was a child"--
+
+
+
+
+
+ALADDIN O'BRIEN
+
+I
+
+
+It was on the way home from Sunday-school that Aladdin had
+enticed Margaret to the forbidden river.  She was not sure
+that he knew how to row, for he was prone to exaggerate his
+prowess at this and that, and she went because of the fine
+defiance of it, and because Aladdin exercised an irresistible
+fascination.  He it was who could whistle the most engagingly
+through his front teeth; and he it was, when sad dogs of boys
+of the world were met behind the barn, who could blow the
+smoke of the fragrant grapevine through his nose, and swallow
+the same without alarm to himself or to his admirers.  To be
+with him was in itself a soulful wickedness, a delicious and
+elevating lesson in corruption.  But to be with him when he
+had done wrong, and was sorry for it (as always when found
+out), that was enough to give one visions of freckled angels,
+and the sweetness of Paradise in May.
+
+Aladdin brought the skiff into the float, stern first, with a
+bump.  Pride sat high upon his freckled brow, and he whistled
+piercing notes.
+
+"I can do it," he said.  "Now get in."
+
+Margaret embarked very gingerly and smoothed her dress
+carefully, before and after sitting down.  It was a white and
+starchy dress of price, with little blue ribbons at the throat
+and wrists--such a dress as the little girl of a very poor
+papa will find laid out on the gilt and brocade chair beside
+her bed if she goes to sleep and wakes up in heaven.
+
+"Only a little way, 'Laddin, please."
+
+The boy made half a dozen circular, jabbing strokes, and the
+skiff zigzagged out from the float.  It was a fine blue day,
+cool as a cucumber, and across the river from the deserted
+shipyards, where, upon lofty beamings, stood all sorts of
+ships in all stages of composition, the frequent beeches and
+maples showed pink and red and yellow against the evergreen
+pines.
+
+"It's easy 'nough," said Aladdin.  And Margaret agreed in her
+mind, for it is the splash of deeds rather than the skill or
+power which impresses a lady.  The little lady sat primly in
+the stern, her mitted paws folded; her eyes, innocent and
+immense, fastened admiringly upon the rowing boy.
+
+"Only 'bout's far's the cat-boat, 'Laddin, please," she said.
+"I oughtn't to of come 't all."
+
+Somehow the cat-boat, anchored fifty yards out and straining
+back from her moorings, would not allow herself to be
+approached.  For although Aladdin maintained a proper
+direction (at times), the ocean tide, setting rigidly in and
+overbearing the current of the river, was beginning to carry
+the skiff to some haven where she would not be.
+
+Aladdin saw this and tried to go back, catching many crabs in
+the earnestness of his endeavor.  Then the little girl,
+without being told, perceived that matters were not entirely
+in the hands of man, and began to look wistfully from Aladdin
+to the shore.  After a while he stopped grinning, and then
+rowing.
+
+"Can't you get back, 'Laddin?" said the little girl.
+
+"No," said the boy, "I can't."  He was all angel now, for he
+was being visited for wrong.
+
+The little girl's lips trembled and got white.
+
+"I'm awful sorry, Margaret."
+
+"What'll we do, 'Laddin?"
+
+"Just sit still, 'n' whatever happens I'll take care of you,
+Margaret."
+
+They were passing the shipyards with a steady sweep, but the
+offices were closed, the men at home, and no one saw the
+distressed expedition. The last yard of all was conspicuous by
+a three-master, finished, painted, sparred, ready for the
+fragrant bottle to be cracked on her nose, and the long
+shivering slide into the river. Then came a fine square,
+chimneyed house with sherry-glass-shaped elm-trees about it.
+The boy shouted to a man contorted under a load of wood. The
+man looked up and grinned vacantly, for he was not even
+half-witted. And they were swept on. Presently woods drew
+between them and the last traces of habitation,--gorgeous woods
+with intense splashes of color, standing upon clean rocks that
+emphatically divided the water from the land,--and they
+scurried into a region as untroubled by man as was Eden on the
+first morning. The little boy was not afraid, but so sorry and
+ashamed that he could have cried. The little girl, however, was
+even deeper down the throat of remorse, for she had sinned
+three times on Sunday,--first, she had spoken to the
+"inventor's boy"; second, she had not "come straight home";
+third, she had been seduced into a forbidden boat,--and there
+was no balm in Gilead; nor any forgiveness forever. She
+pictured her grand, dark father standing like a biblical
+allegory of "Hell and Damnation" within the somber leathern
+cube of his books, the fiercely white, whalebone cane upon
+which he and old brother gout leaned, and the vast gloomy
+centers at the bases of which glowed his savage eyes. She
+thought of the rolling bitter voice with which she had once
+heard him stiffen the backs of his constituents, and she was
+sore afraid. She did not remember how much he loved her, or the
+impotence of his principles where she was concerned. And she
+did not recollect, for she had not been old enough to know,
+that the great bitter voice, with its heavy, telling sarcasm,
+had been lifted for humanity--for more humanity upon earth.
+
+"Oh, 'Laddin," she said suddenly, "I daren't go home now."
+
+"Maybe we can get her in farther up," said Aladdin, "and go
+home through the woods.  That'll be something, anyhow."
+
+Margaret shuddered.  She thought of the thin aunt who gave her
+lessons upon the pianoforte--one of the elect, that aunt, who
+had never done wrong, and whom any halo would fit; who gave
+her to understand that the Almighty would raise Cain with any
+little girl who did not practise an hour every day, and pray
+Him, night and morning, to help her keep off the black notes
+when the white notes were intended.  First there would be a
+reckoning with papa, then one with Aunt Marion, last with
+Almighty God, and afterward, horribile dictu, pitchforks for
+little Margaret, and a vivid incandescent state to be
+maintained through eternity at vast cost of pit-coal to a
+gentleman who carried over his arm, so as not to step on it, a
+long snaky tail with a point like a harpoon's.
+
+Meanwhile, Aladdin made sundry attempts to get the boat
+ashore, and failed signally.  The current was as saucy as
+strong.  Now it swept them into the very shade of the trees,
+and as hope rose hot in the boy's heart and he began to stab
+the water with the oars, sent them skipping for the midriver.
+Occasionally a fish jumped to show how easy it was, and high
+overhead an eagle passed statelily in the wake of a cloud.
+After the eagle came a V of geese flying south, moving through
+the treacherous currents and whirlpools of the upper air as
+steadily and directly as a train upon its track.  It seemed as
+if nature had conspired with her children to demonstrate to
+Margaret and Aladdin the facility of precise locomotion.  The
+narrow deeps of the river ended where the shore rolled into a
+high knob of trees; above this it spread over the lower land
+into a great, shallow, swiftly currented lake, having in its
+midst a long turtlebacked island of dense woods and abrupt
+shores.  Two currents met off the knob and formed in the
+direction of the island a long curve of spitting white.
+Aladdin rowed with great fervor.
+
+"Do it if you can, 'Laddin," said the little girl.
+
+It seemed for one moment as if success were about to crown the
+boy's effort, for he brought the boat to an exciting nearness
+to the shore; but that was all.  The current said: "No,
+Aladdin, that is not just the place to land; come with me, and
+bring the boat and the young lady."  And Aladdin at once went
+with the current.
+
+"Margaret," he said, "I done my best."  He crossed his heart.
+
+"I know you done your best, 'Laddin." Margaret's cheeks were
+on the brink of tears.  "I know you done it."
+
+They were dancing sportively farther and farther from the
+shore.  The water broke, now and again, and slapped the boat
+playfully.
+
+"We 've come 'most three miles," said Aladdin.
+
+"I daren't go back if I could now," said Margaret.
+
+Meanwhile Aladdin scanned the horizon far and wide to see if
+he could see anything of Antheus, tossed by the winds, or the
+Phrygian triremes, or Capys, or the ships having upon their
+lofty poops the arms of Caicus.  There was no help in sight.
+Far and wide was the bubbling ruffled river, behind the
+mainland, and ahead the leafy island.
+
+"What'll your father do, 'Laddin?"
+
+Aladdin merely grinned, less by way of explaining what his
+father would do than of expressing to Margaret this: "Have
+courage; I am still with you."
+
+"'Laddin, we're not going so fast."
+
+They had run into nominally still water, and the skiff was
+losing momentum.
+
+"Maybe we'd better land on the island," said Aladdin, "if we
+can, and wait till the tide turns; won't be long now."
+
+Again he plied the oars, and this time with success.  For
+after a little they came into the shadow of the island, the
+keel grunted upon sand, and they got out.  There was a little
+crescent of white beach, with an occasional exclamatory green
+reed sticking from it, and above was a fine arch of birch and
+pine.  They hauled up the boat as far as they could, and sat
+down to wait for the tide to turn.  Firm earth, in spite of
+her awful spiritual forebodings, put Margaret in a more
+cheerful mood.  Furthermore, the woods and the general mystery
+of islands were as inviting as Punch.
+
+"It's not much fun watching the tide come in," she said after
+a time.
+
+Aladdin got up.
+
+"Let's go away," he said, "and come back.  It never comes in
+if you watch for it to."
+
+Margaret arose, and they went into the woods.
+
+A devil's darning-needle came and buzzed for an instant on the
+bow of the skiff.  A belated sandpiper flew into the cove,
+peeped, and flew out.
+
+The tide rose a little and said:
+
+"What is this heavy thing upon my back?"
+
+Then it rose a little more.
+
+"Why, it's poor little sister boat stuck in the mud," said the
+tide.
+
+From far off came joyful crackling of twigs and the sounds of
+children at play.
+
+The tide rose a little more and freed an end of the boat.
+
+"That's better," said the boat, "ever so much better.  I can
+almost float."
+
+Again the tide raised its broad shoulders a hair's-breadth.
+
+"Great!" said the boat.  "Once more, Old Party!"
+
+When the children came back, they found that poor little
+sister boat was gone, and in her stead all of their forgotten
+troubles had returned and were waiting for them, and looking
+them in the face.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It is absurdly difficult to get help in this world.  If a lady
+puts her head out of a window and yells "Police," she is
+considered funny, or if a man from the very bottom of his soul
+calls for help, he is commonly supposed to be drunk.  Thus if,
+cast away upon an island, you should wave your handkerchief to
+people passing in a boat, they would imagine that you wanted
+to be friendly, and wave back; or, if they were New York
+aldermen out for a day's fishing in the Sound, call you names.
+And so it was with Margaret and Aladdin.  With shrill piping
+voices they called tearfully to a party sailing up the river
+from church, waved and waved, were answered in kind, and
+tasted the bitterest cup possible to the Crusoed.
+
+Then after much wandering in search of the boat it got to be
+hunger-time, and two small stomachs calling lustily for food
+did not add to the felicity of the situation.
+
+With hunger-time came dusk, and afterward darkness, blacker
+than the tall hat of Margaret's father.  For at the last
+moment nature had thought better of the fine weather which man
+had been enjoying for the past month, and drawn a vast curtain
+of inkiness over the luminaries from one horizon even unto the
+other, and sent a great puff of wet fog up the valley of the
+river from the ocean, so that teeth chattered and the ends of
+fingers became shriveled and bloodless.  And had not vanity
+gone out with the entrance of sin, Margaret would have noticed
+that her tight little curls were looser and the once stately
+ostrich feather upon her Sunday hat, the envy of little girls
+whom the green monster possessed, as flabby as a long sermon.
+
+Meanwhile the tide having turned, little sister boat made fine
+way of it down the river, and, burrowing in the fog, holding
+her breath as it were, and greatly assisted by the tide,
+slipped past the town unseen, and put for open sea, where it is
+to be supposed she enjoyed herself hugely and, finally,
+becoming a little skeleton of herself on unknown shores, was
+gathered up by somebody who wanted a pretty fire with green
+lights in it. The main point is that she went her selfish way
+undetected, so that the wide-lanterned search which presently
+arose for little Margaret tumbled and stumbled about clueless,
+and halted to take drinks, and came back about morning and lay
+down all day, and said it never did, which it certainly hadn't.
+All the to-do was over Margaret, for Aladdin had not been
+missed, and, even if he had, nobody would have looked for him.
+His father was at home bending over the model of the wonderful
+lamp which was to make his fortune, and over which he had been
+bending for fifteen rolling years. It had come to him, at about
+the time that he fell in love with Aladdin's mother, that a
+certain worthless biproduct of something would, if combined
+with something else and steeped in water, generate a certain
+gas, which, though desperately explosive, would burn with a
+flame as white as day. Over the perfection of this invention,
+with a brief honeymoon for vacation, he had spent fifteen
+years, a small fortune,--till he had nothing left, --the most
+of his health, and indeed everything but his conviction that it
+was a beautiful invention and sure of success. When Aladdin
+arrived, he was red and wrinkled, after the everlasting fashion
+of the human babe, and had no name, so because of the wonderful
+lamp they called him Aladdin. And that rendered his first
+school-days wretched and had nothing to do with the rest of his
+life, after the everlasting fashion of wonderful names.
+Aladdin's mother went out of the world in the very natural act
+of ushering his young brother into it, and he remembered her as
+a thin person who was not strictly honorable (for, having
+betrayed him with a kiss, she punished him for smoking) and had
+a headache. So there was nobody to miss Aladdin or to waste the
+valuable night in looking for him.
+
+About this time Margaret began to cry and Aladdin to comfort
+her, and they stumbled about in the woods trying to find
+--anything.  After awhile they happened into a grassy glade
+between two steep rocks, and there agreeing to rest, scrunched
+into a depression of the rock on the right.  And Margaret, her
+nose very red, her hat at an angle, and her head on Aladdin's
+shoulder, sobbed herself to sleep.  And then, because being
+trusted is next to being God, and the most moving and gentlest
+condition possible, Aladdin, for the first time, felt the full
+measure of his crime in leading Margaret from the straight way
+home, and he pressed her close to him and stroked her draggled
+hair with his cold little hands and cried.  Whenever she moved
+in sleep, his heart went out to her, and before the night was
+old he loved her forever.
+
+Sleep did not come to Aladdin, who had suddenly become a
+father and a mother and a nurse and a brother and a lover and
+a man who must not be afraid.  His coat was wrapped about
+Margaret, and his arms were wrapped about his coat, and the
+body of him shivered against the damp, cold shirt, which would
+come open in front because there was a button gone.  The fog
+came in thicker and colder, and night with her strange noises
+moved slower and slower.  There was an old loon out on the
+river, who would suddenly throw back his head and laugh for no
+reason at all.  And once a great strange bird went rushing
+past, squeaking like a mouse; and once two bright eyes came,
+flashing out of the night and swung this way and that like
+signal-lanterns and disappeared.  Aladdin gave himself up for
+lost and would have screamed if he had been alone.
+
+Presently his throat began to tickle, then the base of his
+nose, then the bridge thereof, and then he felt for a
+handkerchief and found none.  For a little while he maintained
+the proprieties by a gentle sniffling, finally by one great
+agonized snuff.  It seemed after that as if he were to be left
+in peace.  But no.  His lips parted, his chin went up a
+little, his eyes closed, the tickling gave place to a sudden
+imperative ultimatum, and, when all was over, Margaret had
+waked.
+
+They talked for a long time, for she could not go to sleep
+again, and Aladdin told her many things and kept her from
+crying, but he did not tell her about the awful bird or the
+more awful eyes.  He told her about his little brother, and
+the yellow cat they had, and about the great city where he had
+once lived, and why he was called Aladdin.  And when the real
+began to grow dim, he told her stories out of strange books
+that he had read, as he remembered them--first the story of
+Aladdin and then others.
+
+"Once," began Aladdin, though his teeth were knocking together
+and his arms aching and his nose running--"once there was a
+man named Ali Baba, and he had forty thieves--"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Even in the good north country, where the white breath of the
+melting icebergs takes turn and turn with diamond nights and
+days, people did not remember so thick a fog; nor was there a
+thicker recorded in any chapter of tradition.  Indeed, if the
+expression be endurable, so black was the whiteness that it
+was difficult to know when morning came.  There was a fresher
+shiver in the cold, the sensibility that tree-tops were
+stirring, a filmy distinction of objects near at hand, and the
+possibility that somewhere 'way back in the east the rosy
+fingers of dawn were spread upon a clear horizon.  Collisions
+between ships at sea were reported, and many a good sailorman
+went down full fathom five to wait for the whistle of the
+Great Boatswain.
+
+The little children on the island roused themselves and groped
+about among the chilled, dripping stems of the trees; they
+had no end in view, and no place to go, but motion was
+necessary for the lame legs and arms.  Margaret had caught a
+frightful cold and Aladdin a worse, and they were hungrier than
+should be allowed.  Now a jarred tree rained water down their
+necks, and now their faces went with a splash and sting into
+low-hanging plumes of leaves; often there would be a slip and a
+scrambling fall.  And by the time Aladdin had done grimacing
+over a banged shin, Margaret would have a bruised anklebone to
+cry about.  The poor little soul was very tired and penitent
+and cold and hurt and hungry, and she cried most of the time
+and was not to be comforted.  But Aladdin bit his lips and
+held his head up and said it all would be well sometime.
+Perhaps, though he still had a little courage left, Aladdin
+was the more to be pitied of the two: he was not only
+desperately responsible for it all, but full of imagination
+and the horrible things he had read.  Margaret, like most
+women, suffered a little from self-centration, and to her the
+trunk of a birch was just a nasty old wet tree, but to Aladdin
+it was the clammy limb of one drowned, and drawn from the
+waters to stand in eternal unrest.  At length the stumbling
+progress brought them to a shore of the island: a slippery
+ledge of rock, past whose feet the water slipped hurriedly,
+steaming with fog as if it had been hot, two big leaning
+birches, and a ruddy mink that slipped like winking into a
+hole.  The river, evident for only a few yards, became lost in
+the fog, and where they were could only be guessed, and which
+way the tide was setting could only be learned by experiment.
+Aladdin planted a twig at the precise edge of the water, and
+they sat down to watch.  Stubbornly and unwillingly the water
+receded from the twig, and they knew that the tide was running
+out.
+
+"That's the way home," said Aladdin.  Margaret looked
+wistfully down-stream, her eyes as misty as the fog.
+
+"If we had the boat we could go now," said Aladdin.
+
+Then he sat moody, evolving enterprise, and neither spoke for
+a long time.
+
+"Marg'ret," said Aladdin, at length, "help me find a big log
+near the water."
+
+"What you going to do, 'Laddin?"
+
+"You 'll see.  Help look."
+
+They crept along the edge of the island, now among the
+close-growing trees and now on the bare strip between them and
+the water, until at length they came upon a big log, lying
+like some gnarled amphibian half in the river and half on the
+dry land.
+
+"Help push," said Aladdin.
+
+They could move it only a little, not enough.
+
+"Wait till I get a lever," said Aladdin.  He went, and came
+back with a long, stiff little birch, that, growing recklessly
+in the thin soil over a rock, had been willing to yield to the
+persuasion of a child and come up by the roots.  And then,
+Margaret pushing her best, and Aladdin prying and grunting,
+the log was moved to within an ace of launching.  Until now,
+for she was too young to understand about daring and
+unselfishness, Margaret had considered the log-launching as a
+game invented by Aladdin to while away the dreary time; but
+now she realized, from the look in the pale, set, freckly,
+almost comical face of the boy, that deeds more serious were
+afoot, and when he said, "Somebody'll pick me up, sure,
+Marg'ret, and help me come back and get you," she broke out
+crying afresh and said, "Don't, 'Laddin!  Doo-on't, 'Laddin!"
+
+"Don't cry, Marg'ret," said Aladdin, with a gulp.  "I'd do
+more'n that for you, and I can swim a little, too--b-better'n
+I can row."
+
+"Oh, 'Laddin," said Margaret, "it's so cold in the water."
+
+"Shucks!" said Aladdin, whose teeth had been knocking all
+night. "She's the stanch little craft" (he had the phrase of a
+book) "Good Luck. I'm the captain and you're the builder's
+daughter"--and so she was. "Chrissen 'er, Marg'et. Kiss her on
+the bow an' say she's the Good Luck."
+
+Then Margaret, her hat over one ear, and the draggled ostrich
+feather greatly in the way, knelt, and putting her arms about
+the shoreward end of the log, kissed it, and said in a drawn
+little voice
+
+"The Good Luck."
+
+"And now, Margaret," said Aladdin, "you must stay right here'
+n' not go 'way from the shore, so's I can find you when I come
+back.  But don't just sit still all the time,--keep moving,
+so's not to get any colder,--'n I'll come back for you sure."
+
+Then, because he felt his courage failing, he said, "Good-by,
+Marg'ret," and turning abruptly, waded in to his ankles and
+bent over the log to give it that final impetus which was to
+set it adrift.  In his heart were several things: the desire
+to make good, fear of the river, and, poignant and bitter, the
+feeling that Margaret did not understand.  He was too young to
+believe that death might really be near him (almost reckless
+enough not to care if he had), but keenly aware that his
+undertaking was perilous enough to warrant a more adequate
+farewell.  So he bent bitterly over the log and stiffened his
+back for the heave.  It must be owned that Aladdin wanted more
+of a scene.
+
+"'Laddin, I forgot something.  Come back."
+
+He came, his white lips drawn into a sort of smile.  Then they
+kissed each other on the mouth with the loud, innocent kiss of
+little children, and after that Aladdin felt that the river
+was only a river, the cold only cold, the danger only danger
+and flowers--more than flowers.
+
+He moved the log easily and waded with it into the icy waters,
+until his feet were dragged from the bottom, and after one
+awful instant of total submersion the stanch little ship Good
+Luck and valiant Captain Kissed-by-Margaret were embarked on
+the voyage perilous.  His left arm over and about the log, his
+legs kicking lustily like the legs of a frog, his right hand
+paddling desperately for stability, Aladdin disappeared into
+the fog.  After a few minutes he became so freezing cold that
+he would have let go and drowned gladly if it had not been for
+the wonderful lamp which had been lighted in his heart.
+
+Margaret, when she saw him borne from her by the irresistible
+current, cried out with all the illogic of her womanly little
+soul, "Come back, 'Laddin, come back!" and sank sobbing upon
+the empty shore.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+However imminent the peril of the man, it is the better part
+of chivalry to remain by the distressed lady, and though
+impotent to be of assistance, we must linger near Margaret,
+and watch her gradually rise from prone sobbing to a sitting
+attitude of tears.  For a long time she sat crying on the
+empty shore, regarding for the most part black life and not at
+all the signs of cheerful change which were becoming evident
+in the atmosphere about her.  The cold breath across her face
+and hands and needling through her shivering body, the
+increasing sounds of treetops in commotion, the recurring
+appearance of branches where before had been only an opaque
+vault, did little to inform her that the fog was about to
+lift.  The rising wind merely made her the more miserable and
+alone.  Nor was it until a disk of gold smote suddenly on the
+rock before her that she looked up and beheld a twinkle of
+blue sky.  The fog puffed across the blue, the blue looked
+down again,--a bigger eye than before,--a wisp of fog filmed
+it again, and again it gleamed out, ever larger and always
+more blue.  The good wind living far to the south had heard
+that in a few days a little girl was to be alone and
+comfortless upon a foggy island, and, hearing, had filled his
+vast chest with warmth and sunshine, and puffed out his merry
+cheeks and blown.  The great breath sent the blue waves
+thundering upon the coral beaches of Florida, tore across the
+forests of palm and set them all waving hilariously, shook the
+merry orange-trees till they rattled, whistled through the
+dismal swamps of Georgia, swept, calling and shouting to
+itself, over the Carolinas, where clouds were hatching in
+men's minds, banked up the waters of the Chesapeake so that
+there was a great high tide and the ducks were sent scudding
+to the decoys of the nearest gunner, went roaring into the
+oaks and hickories of New York, warmed the veins of New
+England fruit-trees, and finally coming to the giant fog, rent
+it apart by handfuls as you pluck feathers from a goose, and
+hurled it this way and that, until once more the sky and land
+could look each other in the face.  Then the great wind
+laughed and ceased.
+For a long time Margaret looked down the cleared face of the
+river, but there was no trace of Aladdin, and in life but one
+comfort: the sun was hot and she was getting warm.
+
+After a time, in the woods directly behind where she sat
+hoping and fearing and trying to dry her tears, a gun sounded
+like an exclamation of hope.  Had Aladdin by any incredible
+circumstance returned so soon? Mindful of his warning not to
+stray from where she was, Margaret stood up and called in a
+shrill little voice
+
+"Here I am! Here I am!"
+
+Silence in the woods immediately behind where Margaret stood
+hoping and fearing!
+
+"Here I am!" she cried.  And it had been piteous to hear, so
+small and shrill was the voice.
+
+Presently, though much farther off, sounded the merry yapping
+bark of a little dog, and again, but this time like an echo of
+itself, the exclamation of hope--hope deferred.
+
+"Here I am! Here--I--am!" called Margaret.
+
+Then there was a long silence--so long that it seemed as if
+nothing in the world could have been so long.  Margaret sat
+down gasping.  The sun rose higher, the river ran on, and hope
+flew away.  And just as hope had gone for good, the merry
+yapping of the dog broke out so near that Margaret jumped, and
+bang went the gun--like a promise of salvation.  Instantly she
+was on her feet with her shrill,
+
+"Here I am!  Here I am!"
+
+And this time came back a lusty young voice crying:
+
+"I'm coming!"
+
+And hard behind the voice leaves shook, and a boy came
+striding into the sunlight.  In one hand he trailed a gun, and
+at his heels trotted a waggish spaniel of immense importance
+and infinitesimal size.  In his other hand the boy carried by
+the legs a splendid cock-grouse, ruffled and hunger-compelling.
+The boy, perhaps two years older than Aladdin, was big and strong
+for his age, and bore his shining head like a young wood-god.
+
+Margaret ran to him, telling her story as she went, but so
+incoherently that when she reached him she had to stop and
+begin over again.
+
+"Then Senator St. John is your father?" said the boy at
+length.  "You know, he's a great friend of my father's.  My
+father's name is Peter Manners, and he used to be a
+congressman for New York.  Are you hungry?"
+
+Margaret could only look it.
+
+They sat down, and the boy took wonderful things out of his
+wonderful pockets--sandwiches of egg and sandwiches of jam;
+and Margaret fell to.
+
+"I live in New York," said the boy, "but I'm staying with my
+cousins up the river.  They told me there were partridges on
+this island, and I rowed down to try and get some, but I
+missed two."
+The boy blushed most becomingly whenever he spoke, and his
+voice, and the way he said words, were different from anything
+Margaret had ever heard.  And she admired him tremendously.
+And the boy, because she had spent a night on a desert island,
+which he never had, admired her in turn.
+
+"Maybe we'll find 'Laddin on the way," said Margaret,
+cheerfully, and she looked up with great eyes at her godlike
+young friend.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Meanwhile to Aladdin and his log divers things had occurred,
+but the wonderful lamp, burning low or high at the will of the
+river, had not gone out.  Sliding through the smoking fog at
+three miles an hour, kicking and paddling, all had gone well
+for a while.  Then, for he was more keen than Margaret to note
+the fog's promise to lift, at the very moment when the shores
+began to appear and mark his course as favorable, at the very
+moment when the sun struck one end of the log, an eddy of the
+current struck the other, and sent the stanch little craft
+Good Luck and her captain by a wide curve back up the river.
+The backward journey was slow and tortuous, and twice when the
+Good Luck turned turtle, submerging Aladdin, he gave himself
+up for lost; but amidships of the island, fairly opposite to
+the spot where he had left Margaret, the log was again seized
+by the right current, and the voyage recommenced.  But the
+same eddy seized them, and back they came, with only an arm
+stiffened by cold between Aladdin and death.  The third
+descent of the river, however, was more propitious.  The eddy,
+it is true, made a final snatch, but its fingers were weakened
+and its murderous intentions thwarted.  They passed by the
+knob of trees at the narrowing of the river, and swept grandly
+toward the town.  Past the first shipyard they tore unnoticed,
+but at the second a shouting arose, and a boat was slipped
+overboard and put after them.  Strong hands dragged Aladdin
+from the water, and, gulp after gulp, water gushed from his
+mouth.  Then they rowed him quickly to land, and the Good
+Luck, having done her duty, went down the river alone.  Years
+after, could Aladdin have met with that log, he would have
+recognized it like the face of a friend, and would have
+embraced and kissed it, painted it white to stave off the
+decay of old age, and set it foremost among his Lares and
+Penates.
+
+For the present he was insensible.  They put him naked into
+coarse, warm horse-blankets, and laid him before the great
+fire in the blacksmith's shop across the road from the
+shipyard.  And at the same time they sent one flying with a
+horse and buggy to the house of Hannibal St. John, for Aladdin
+had not passed into unconsciousness without partly completing
+his mission.
+
+"Margaret--is--up--at--" he said, and darkness came.
+
+At the moment when Aladdin came to, the door of the smithy was
+darkened by the tremendous figure of Hannibal St. John.
+Wrapped in his long black cloak, fastened at the throat by
+three links of steel chain, his face glowering and cavernous,
+the great man strode like a controlled storm through the awed
+underlings and stopped rigid at Aladdin's side.
+
+"Can the boy speak?" he said.
+
+To Aladdin, looking up, there was neither pity nor mercy
+apparent in the senator's face, and a great fear shook him.
+Would the wrath descend?
+
+"Do you know where my daughter is?"
+
+The great rolling voice nearly broke between the "my" and the
+"daughter," and the fear left Aladdin.
+
+"Mister St. John," he said, "she's up at one of the islands.
+We went in a boat and couldn't get back.  If you'll only get a
+boat and some one to row, I can take you right to her."  Then
+Aladdin knew that he had not said all there was to say.
+"Mister St. John," said Aladdin, "I done it all."
+
+Men ran out of the smithy to prepare a boat.
+
+"Who is this boy?" said St. John.
+
+"It's Aladdin O'Brien, the inventor's boy," said the smith.
+
+"Are you strong enough to go with me, O'Brien?" said the
+senator.
+
+"Yes, sir; I've got to go," said Aladdin.  "I said I'd come
+back for her."
+
+"Give him some whisky," said St. John, in the voice of Jupiter
+saying "Poison him," "and wrap him up warm, and bring him
+along."
+
+They embarked.  Aladdin, cuddled in blankets, was laid in
+the bow, St. John, not deigning to sit, stood like a black
+tree-trunk in the stern, and amidships were four men to row.
+
+A little distance up the river they met a boat coming down.
+In the stern sat Margaret, and at the oars her godlike young
+friend.  Just over the bow appeared the snout and merry eyes
+of the spaniel, one of his delightful ears hanging over on
+each side.
+
+"I am glad to see you alive," said St. John to Margaret when
+the boats were within hailing distance, and to her friend he
+said, "Since you have brought her so far, be good enough to
+bring her the rest of the way."  And to his own rowers he
+said, "Go back."
+When the boats came to land at the shipyard, Margaret's father
+lifted her out and kissed her once on each cheek.  Of the
+godlike boy he asked his name, and when he learned that it was
+Peter Manners and that his father was Peter Manners, he almost
+smiled, and he shook the boy's hand.
+
+"I will send word to your cousins up the river that you are
+with me," he said, and thus was the invitation extended and
+accepted.
+
+"O'Brien," said the great man to Aladdin, "when you feel able,
+come to my house; I have something to say to you."
+
+Then Senator St. John, and Margaret, and Margaret's godlike
+young friend, and the spaniel got into the carriage that was
+waiting for them, and drove off.  But Margaret turned and
+waved to Aladdin.
+
+"Good-by, Aladdin!" she called.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+They helped Aladdin back to the smithy, for his only covering
+was a clumsy blanket; and there he put on his shrunken
+clothes, which meanwhile had dried.  The kindly men pressed
+food on him, but he could not eat.  He could only sit blankly
+by the fire and nurse the numb, overpowering pain in his
+heart.  Another had succeeded where he had failed.  Even at
+parting, just now, Margaret's eyes had not been for him, but
+for the stranger who had done so easily what he had not been
+able to do at all.  The voyage down the river had been mere
+foolishness without result.  He had not rescued his fair lady,
+but deserted her upon a desert island.  For him no bouquets
+were flung, nor was there to be any clapping of hands.  After
+a time he rose like one dreaming, and went slowly, for he was
+sick and weak, up to the great pillared house of Hannibal St.
+John.  The senator in that stern voice of his had bade him
+come; nothing could be any worse than it was.  He would go.
+He knocked, and they showed him into the library.  It was four
+walls of leather books, an oak table neater than a pin, a huge
+chair covered with horsehair much worn, and a blazing fire of
+birch logs.  Before the fire, one hand thrust into his coat,
+the other resting somewhat heavily upon the head of a
+whalebone cane, stood the senator.  Far off Aladdin heard
+Margaret's laugh and with it another young laugh.  Then he
+looked up like a little hunted thing into the senator's
+smoldering eyes.
+
+"Sit down in that chair," said the senator, pointing with his
+cane to the only chair in the room.  His voice had the effect
+of a strong muscular compulsion to which men at once yielded.
+Aladdin sat into the big chair, his toes swinging just clear
+of the ground.  Then there was silence.  Aladdin broke it.
+
+"Is Margaret all right?" he gulped.
+
+The senator disregarded the question.  Having chosen his
+words, he said them.
+
+"I do not know," he began, "what my daughter was doing in a
+boat with you.  I do not object to her enjoying the society at
+proper times of suitable companions of her own age, but the
+society of those who lead her into temptation is not
+suitable."  Aladdin fairly wilted under the glowering voice.
+"You will not be allowed to associate with her any more," said
+the senator.  "I will speak to your father and see that he
+forbids it."
+
+Aladdin climbed out of the chair, and stumbled blindly into
+the table.  He had meant to find the door and go.
+
+"Wait; I have not done," said the senator.
+
+Aladdin turned and faced the enemy who was taking away the joy
+of life from him.
+
+"In trying to atone for your fault," said the senator, "by
+imperiling your life, you did at once a foolhardy and a fine
+thing--one which I will do my best to repay at any time that
+you may see fit to call upon me.  For the present you may find
+this of use."  He held forward between his thumb and
+forefinger a twenty-dollar gold piece.  Aladdin groped for
+words, and remembered a phrase which he had heard his own
+father return to a tormentor.  He thrust his red hands into
+his tight pockets, and with trembling lips looked up.
+
+"It's a matter of pride," he said, and walked out of the room.
+When he had gone the senator took from his pocket a leather
+purse, opened it, put back the gold piece, and carefully tied
+the string.  Then far from any known key or tune the great man
+whistled a few notes.  Could his constituents have heard, they
+would have known--and often had the subject been debated--that
+Hannibal St. John was human.
+
+Aladdin stood for a while upon the lofty pillared portico of
+the senator's house, and with a mist in his eyes looked away
+and away to where the cause of all his troubles flowed like a
+ribbon of silver through the bright-colored land.  Grown men,
+having, in their whole lives, suffered less than Aladdin was
+at that moment suffering, have considered themselves
+heartbroken.  The little boy shivered and toiled down the
+steps, between the tall box hedges lining the path, and out
+into the road.  A late rose leaning over the garden fence gave
+up her leaves in a pink shower as he passed, and at the same
+instant all the glass in a window of the house opposite fell
+out with a smash.  These events seemed perfectly natural to
+Aladdin, but when people, talking at the tops of their voices
+and gesticulating, began to run out of houses and make down
+the hill toward the town, he remembered that, just as the
+rose-leaves fell and just as the glass came out of the
+window-frame, he had been conscious of a distant thudding
+boom, and a jarring of the ground under his feet.  So he
+joined in the stream of his neighbors, and ran with them
+down the hill to see what had happened.
+
+Aladdin remembered little of that breathless run, and one
+thing only stood ever afterward vivid among his recollections.
+All the people were headed eagerly in one direction, but at
+the corner of the street in which Aladdin lived, an awkish,
+half-grown girl, her face contorted with terror, struggled
+against the tugging of two younger companions and screamed in
+a terrible voice:
+
+"I don't wahnt to go! I don't wahnt to go!"
+
+But they dragged her along.  That girl had no father, and her
+mother walked the streets.  She would never have any beauty
+nor any grace; she was dirt of the dirt, dirty, but she had a
+heart of mercy and could not bear to look upon suffering.
+
+"I don't wahnt to go!  I don't wahnt to go!" and now the
+scream was a shudder.
+
+Aladdin's street was crowded to suffocation, and the front of
+the house where Aladdin lived was blown out, and men with
+grave faces were going about among the ruins looking for what
+was left of Aladdin's father.
+
+A much littler boy than Aladdin stood in the yard of the
+house.  In his arms folded high he clutched a yellow cat, who
+licked his cheek with her rough tongue.  The littler boy kept
+crying, "'Laddin, 'Laddin!"
+
+Aladdin took the little boy and the yellow cat all into one
+embrace, and people turned away their heads.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+In the ensuing two days Aladdin matured enormously, for though
+a kind neighbor took him in, together with his brother Jack and
+the yellow cat, he had suffered many things and already sniffed
+the wolf at the door. The kind neighbor was a widow lady, whose
+husband, having been a master carpenter of retentive habits,
+had left her independently rich. She owned the white-and-green
+house in which she lived, the plot of ground, including a small
+front and a small back yard, upon which it stood, and she spent
+with some splendor a certain income of three hundred and
+eighty-two dollars a year. Every picture, every chair, every
+mantelpiece in the Widow Brackett's house was draped with a
+silk scarf. The parlor lamp had a glass shade upon which,
+painted in oils, by hand, were crimson moss-roses and scarlet
+poppies. A crushed plush spring rocker had goldenrod painted on
+back and seat, while two white-and-gold vases in precise
+positions on the mantel were filled with tight round bunches of
+immortelles, stained pink. Upon the marble-topped,
+carved-by-machine-walnut-legged table in the bay-window were
+things to be taken up by a visitor and examined. A white plate
+with a spreading of foreign postage-stamps, such as any boy
+collector has in quantities for exchange, was the first
+surprise: you were supposed to discover that the stamps were
+not real, but painted on the plate, and exclaim about it. A
+china basket contained most edible-looking fruit of the same
+material, and a huge album, not to be confounded with the
+family Bible upon which it rested, was filled with speaking
+likenesses of the Widow Brackett's relatives. The Bible beneath
+could have told when each was born, when many had died, and
+where many were buried. But nobody was ever allowed to look
+into the Widow Brackett's Bible for information mundane or
+spiritual, since the only result would have been showers of
+pressed ferns and flowers upon the carpet, which was not
+without well-pressed flowers and ferns of its own.
+
+Very soon after the explosion of the wonderful lamp the Widow
+Brackett had taken Aladdin and Jack and the cat into her house
+and seen to it that they had a square meal.  Early on the
+second day she came to the conclusion that if it could in any
+way be made worth her while, she would like to keep them until
+they grew up.  And when the ground upon which Aladdin's
+father's house had stood was sold at auction for three hundred
+and eight dollars, she let it be known that if she could get
+that she would board the two little waifs until Aladdin was
+old enough to work.  The court appointed two guardians.  The
+guardians consulted for a few minutes over something brown in
+a glass, and promptly turned over the three hundred and eight
+dollars to the Widow Brackett; and the Widow Brackett almost
+as promptly made a few alterations in the up-stairs of her
+house the better to accommodate the orphans, tied a dirty
+white ribbon about the yellow cat's neck, and bought a
+derelict piano upon which her heart had been set for many
+months.  She was no musician, but she loved a tightly closed
+piano with a scarf draped over the top, and thought that no
+parlor should be without one.  Up to middle C, as Aladdin in
+time found out, the piano in question was not without musical
+pretensions, but above that any chord sounded like a nest of
+tin plates dropped on a wooden floor, and the intervals were
+those of no known scale nor fragment thereof.  But in time he
+learned to draw pleasant things from the old piano and to
+accompany his shrill voice in song.  As a matter of fact, he
+had no voice and never would have, but almost from the first
+he knew how to sing.  It so happened that he was drawn to the
+piano by a singular thing: a note from his beloved.
+
+It came one morning thumb-marked about the sealing, and
+covered with the generous sprawl of her writing.  It said:
+
+DEAR ALADDIN: Do not say anything about this because I do not
+know if my father would like it but I am so sorry about your
+father blowing up and all your troubles and I want you to know
+how sory I am.  I must stop now because I have to practis.
+
+         Your loving friend
+
+                        MARGARET ST. JOHN.
+
+Aladdin was an exquisite speller, and the first thing he
+noticed about the letter was that it contained two words
+spelled wrong, and that he loved Margaret the better by two
+misspelled words, and that he had a lump in his throat.
+
+He had found the letter by his plate at breakfast, and the
+eyes of Mrs. Brackett fastened upon it.
+
+"I don't know who ken have been writin' to you," she said.
+
+"Neither do I," said Aladdin, giving, as is proper, the direct
+lie to the remark inquisitive.  He had put the letter in his
+pocket.
+
+"Why don't you open it and see?"
+
+Aladdin blushed.
+
+"Time enough after breakfast," he said.
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"Jack's eatin' his breakfast; why ain't you eatin' yours?"
+
+Aladdin fell upon his breakfast for the sake of peace.  And
+Mrs. Brackett said no more.  Some days later, for she was not
+to be denied in little matters or great, Mrs. Brackett found
+where Aladdin had hidden the letter, took it up, read it,
+sniffed, and put it back, with the remark that she never "see
+such carryin's-on."
+
+Aladdin hid, and read his letter over and over; then an
+ominous silence having informed him that Mrs. Brackett had
+gone abroad, he stole into the parlor, perched on the
+piano-stool, and, like a second Columbus, began to discover
+things which other people have to be shown.  The joy of his
+soul had to find expression, as often afterward the sorrow
+of it.
+
+That winter Jack entered school in the lowest class, and the
+two little boys were to be seen going or coming in close
+comradeship, fair weather or foul.  The yellow cat had affairs
+of gallantry, and bore to the family, at about Christmas-time,
+five yellow kittens, which nobody had the heart to drown, and
+about whose necks, at the age of eye-opening, the Widow
+Brackett tied little white ribbons in large bows.
+
+Sometimes Aladdin saw Margaret, but only for a little.
+
+So the years passed, and Aladdin turned his sixteenth year.
+He was very tall and very thin, energetic but not strong, very
+clever, but with less application than an uncoerced camel.  To
+single him from other boys, he was full of music and visions.
+And rhymes were beginning to ring in his head.
+
+A week came when the rhymes and the music went clean out of
+his head, which became as heavy as a scuttle full of coal, and
+he walked about heavily like an old man.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+One day, during the morning session of school, Aladdin's head
+got so heavy that he could hardly see, and he felt hot all
+over.  He spoke to the teacher and was allowed to go home.
+Mrs. Brackett, when she saw him enter the yard, was in great
+alarm, for she at once supposed that he had done something
+awful, which was not out of the question, and suffered
+expulsion.
+
+"What have you done?" she said.
+
+"Nothing," said Aladdin.  "I think I'm going to be sick."
+
+Mrs. Brackett tossed her hands heavenward.
+
+"What is the matter?" she cried.
+
+"I don't know," said Aladdin.  She followed him into the house
+and up the stairs, which he climbed heavily.
+
+"Where do you feel bad, 'Laddin O'Brien?" she said sharply.
+
+"It's my head, ma'am," said Aladdin.  He went into his room
+and lay face down on the bed, having first dropped his
+schoolbooks on the floor, and began to talk fluently of kings'
+daughters and genii and copper bottles.
+
+The Widow Brackett was an active woman of action.  Flat-footed
+and hatless, but with incredible speed, she dashed down the
+stairs, out of the house, and up the street.  She returned in
+five minutes with the doctor.
+
+The doctor said, "Fever."  It was quite evident that it was
+fever; but a doctor's word for it put everything on a
+comfortable and satisfactory footing.
+
+"We must get him to bed," said the doctor.  He made the
+attempt alone, but Aladdin struggled, and the doctor was old.
+Mrs. Brackett came to the rescue and, finally, they got
+Aladdin, no longer violent, into his bed, while the doctor, in
+a soft voice, said what maybe it was and what maybe it
+wasn't,--he leaned to a bilious fever,--and prescribed this
+and that as sovereign in any case.  They darkened the room,
+and Aladdin was sick with typhoid fever for many weeks.  He
+was delirious much too much, and Mrs. Brackett got thin with
+watching.  Occasionally it seemed as if he might possibly
+live, but oftenest as if he would surely die.
+
+In his delirium for the most part Aladdin dwelt upon Margaret,
+so that his love for her was an old story to Mrs. Brackett.
+One gay spring morning, after a terrible night, Aladdin's
+fever cooled a little, and he was able to talk in whispers.
+
+"Mrs. Brackett," he said, "Mrs. Brackett."
+
+She came hurriedly to the bed.
+
+"I know you're feelin' better, 'Laddin O'Brien."
+
+He smiled up at her.
+
+"Mrs. Brackett," he said, "I dreamed that Margaret St. John
+came here to ask how I was--did she?"
+
+Margaret hadn't.  She had not, so hedged was her life, even
+heard that Aladdin lay sick.
+
+Mrs. Brackett lied nobly.
+
+"She was here yesterday," she said, "and that anxious to know
+all about you."
+
+Aladdin looked like one that had found peace.
+
+"Thank you," he said.
+
+Mrs. Brackett raised his head, pillow and all, very gently,
+and gave him his medicine.
+
+"How's Jack?" said Aladdin.
+
+"He comes twice every day to ask about you," said Mrs.
+Brackett.  "He's livin' with my brother-in-law."
+
+"That's good," said Aladdin.  He lay back and dozed.  After a
+while he opened his eyes.
+
+"Mrs. Brackett-"
+
+"What is it, deary?"  The good woman had been herself on the
+point of dozing, but was instantly alert.
+
+"Am I going to die?"
+
+"You goin' to die!"  She tried to make her voice indignant,
+but it broke.
+
+"I want to know."
+
+"He wants to know, good land!" exclaimed Mrs. Brackett.
+
+"If a man's going to die," said Aladdin, aeat-sixteen, "he
+wants to know, because he has things that have to be done."
+
+"Doctor said you wasn't to talk much," said Mrs. Brackett.
+
+"If I've got to die," said Aladdin, abruptly, "I've got to see
+Margaret."
+
+A woman in a blue wrapper, muddy slippers, her gray hair
+disheveled, hatless, her eyes bright and wild, burst suddenly
+upon Hannibal St. John where he sat in his library reading in
+the book called "Hesperides."
+
+"Senator St. John," she began rapidly, "Aladdin O'Brien's sick
+in my house, and the last thing he said was, 'I've got to see
+Margaret'; and he's dyin' wantin' to see her, and I've come
+for her, and she's got to come."
+
+It was a tribute to St. John's genius that in spite of her
+incoherent utterance he understood precisely what the woman
+was driving at.
+
+"You say he's dying?" he said.
+
+"Doctor's given up hope.  He's had a relapse since this
+mornin', and she's got to come right now if she's to see him
+at all."
+
+The senator hesitated for once.
+
+"It's got nothin' to do with the proprieties," said Mrs.
+Brackett, sternly, "nor what he was to her, nor her to him;
+it's a plain case of humanity and--"
+
+"What is the nature of the sickness?" asked the senator.
+
+"It's fever--"
+
+"Is it contagious?" asked the senator.
+
+"No, it ain't!" almost shrieked the old lady.  "And what if it
+was?"
+
+"Of course if it were contagious she couldn't go," said the
+senator.
+
+"It ain't contagious, and, what's more, he once laid down his
+life for her on the log, that time."
+
+"If you assure me the fever is not contagious--"
+
+"You'll let her come--"
+
+"It seems nonsense," said the senator.  "They are only
+children, and I don't want her to get silly ideas."
+
+"Only children!" exclaimed Mrs. Brackett.  "Senator, give me
+the troubles of the grown-ups, childbirth, and losing the
+first-born with none to follow, the losing of husband and
+mother, and the approach of old age,--give me them and I'll
+bear them, but spare me the sorrows and trials of little
+children which we grown-ups ain't strong enough to bear.  You
+can say I said so," she finished defiantly.
+
+The senator bowed in agreement.
+
+"I believe you are right," he said.  "I will take you home in
+my carriage, Mrs.--"
+
+"Brackett," said she, with pride.
+
+The senator stepped into the hall and raised his voice the
+least trifle.
+
+"Daughter!"
+
+She answered from several rooms away, and came running.  Her
+hands were inky, and she held a letter.  She was no longer the
+timid little girl of the island, for somehow that escapade had
+emancipated her.  She had waited for a few days in expectation
+of damnation, but, that failing to materialize, had turned
+over a leaf in her character, and became such a bully at home
+that the family and servants loved her more and more from day
+to day.  She was fourteen at this time; altogether exquisite
+and charming and wayward.
+
+"Aladdin O'Brien is very sick, daughter," said the senator,
+"and we are going to see him."
+
+"And don't tell him that you didn't come to ask after him
+yesterday," said Mrs. Brackett, defiantly, "because I said you
+did.  I had my reasons," she went on, "and you can say I said
+so."
+
+Margaret ran up-stairs to get her hat.  She was almost wild
+with excitement and foreboding of she knew not what.
+
+The letter which she had been writing fell from her hand.  She
+picked it up, looked hastily at the superscription, "Mr.
+Peter Manners, Jr.," and tore it into pieces.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+There is no doubt that Aladdin's recovery dated from Margaret's
+visit. The poor boy was too sick to say what he had planned,
+but Margaret sat by his bed for a while and held his hand, and
+said little abrupt conventional things that meant much more to
+them both, and that was enough. Besides, and under the guns of
+her father's eyes, just before she went away she stooped and
+kissed him on the forehead, and that was more than enough to
+make anybody get over anything, Aladdin thought. So he slept a
+long cool sleep after Margaret had gone, and woke free of
+fever. As he lay gathering strength to sit up in bed, which
+treat had been promised him in ten days, Aladdin's mind worked
+hard over the future, and what he could machinate in order one
+day to be almost worthy to kiss the dust under Margaret's feet.
+She sent him flowers twice, but was not allowed to come and see
+him again.
+
+Aladdin had awful struggles with the boredom of convalescence.
+He felt perfectly well, and they wouldn't let him get up and
+out; everything forbidden he wanted to eat.  And his one
+solace was the Brackett library.  This was an extraordinary
+collection of books.  They were seven, and how they got there
+nobody knows.  The most important in the collection was, in
+Mrs. Brackett's estimation, an odd volume of an encyclopedia,
+bound in tree-calf and labeled, "Safety-lamps to Stranglers."
+Next were four fat tomes in the German language on scientific
+subjects; these, provided that anybody had ever wanted to read
+them, had never succeeded in getting themselves read, but they
+had cuts and cuts which were fascinating to surmise about.
+The sixth book was the second volume of a romance called "The
+Headsman," by "the author of 'The Spy,'" and the seventh was a
+back-split edition of Poe's poems.
+
+The second volume of "The Headsman" went like cakes and syrup
+on a cold morning, for it was narrative, and then it was laid
+aside, because it was dull.  The four German books had their
+cuts almost examined out of them, and the encyclopedia book,
+from "Safety-lamps to Stranglers," practically had its
+contents torn out and devoured.  In after life Aladdin could
+always speak with extraordinary fluency, feeling, and
+understanding on anything that began with S, such as Simeon
+Stylites and Senegambia.  But the poems of Poe were what made
+his sickness worth while and put the call upon all his after
+life.  We learn of the critics and professors of English that
+there are greater lyric poets than Poe.  They will base this
+on technicalities and theories of what poetry has been and
+what poetry ought to be, and will not take into account the
+fact that of all of them--Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth when he
+is a poet at all, Heine, and the lyric body of Goethe and the
+rest--not one in proportion to the mass of his production so
+often leaves the ground and spreads wings as Poe,--
+
+    If I might dwell
+    Where Israfel
+    Hath dwelt, and he where I,
+    He might not sing so wildly well
+    A mortal melody,
+    While a bolder note than his might swell
+    From my lyre within the sky,--
+
+and that where they have, they have perhaps risen a little
+higher, but never have sung more hauntingly and clear.  The
+wonderful sounds and the unearthly purity--the purity of a
+little child that has died--took Aladdin by the throat and
+shook up the imagination and music that had lain dormant
+within him; his father's bent for invention clarified into
+a passion for creation.  The first thing he read was three
+stanzas on the left-hand page where the book opened to his
+uneager hands, and his eyes, expectant of disappointment,
+--for up to that time, never having read any, he hated
+poetry,--fell on one of the five or six perfect poems in
+the world:
+
+    Helen, thy beauty is to me
+    Like those Nicean barks of yore
+    That gently o'er a perfumed sea
+    The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
+    To his own native shore.
+
+    On desperate seas long wont to roam,
+    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
+    Thy naiad airs have brought me home
+    To the glory that was Greece,
+    And the grandeur that was Rome.
+
+    Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche
+    How statue-like I see thee stand,
+    The agate lamp within thy hand!
+    Ah, Psyche! From the regions which
+    Are holy land.
+
+And he knew that he had read the most exquisite, the most
+insouciant, and the most universal account of every man's
+heart's desire--Margaret as she would be when she grew tall.
+He knew little of the glory that was Greece or the grandeur
+that was Rome, but whatever they were, Margaret had all of
+them, and the hyacinth hair, very thick and clustery and
+beautiful, and the naiad airs.  Ah, Psyche!
+
+And he read forward and back in the book, and after a little
+he knew that he had a soul, and that the only beautiful thing
+in the world is beauty, and the only sad thing, and that
+beauty is truth.
+
+Open at the lines to Helen he laid the book face down upon his
+heart, with his hands clasped over it, and shut his eyes.
+
+"Now I know what I've got to do," he said.  "Now I know what
+I've got to do."
+
+He dreamed away hours until suddenly the need of deeds set him
+bolt upright in bed, and he called to Mrs. Brackett to bring
+him pencil and paper.  From that time on he was seldom without
+them, and, by turns reading and writing, entered with hope and
+fortitude into the challenging field of literature.  And from
+the first, however ignorant and unkempt the effort, he wrote a
+kind of literature, for he buckled to no work that he knew,
+and was forever striving after an ideal (nebulous,
+indescribable, and far) of his own, and that is literature.
+Go to those who have wrought for--forever (without, of course,
+knowing it) and those who have wrought earnestly for the day,
+and these things you will find made the god in their machine:
+Raphael's sonnets and Dante's picture!  Aladdin had no
+message, that he knew of, for the world, but the call of one
+of the arts was upon him; and he knew that willy-nilly he must
+answer that call as long as eyes could see, or hands hold pen,
+or tongue call for pencil and paper, money buy them, or theft
+procure them.  He set himself stubbornly and courageously to
+the bitter-sweet task of learning to write.
+
+"It must be like learning anything else," he said, his eyes on
+a sheet of seemingly uncorrectable misbalances, "and just
+because I'm rotten at it now doesn't prove that if I practise
+and practise, and try and try, and hope and hope, I won't be
+some good sometime."
+
+He saw very clearly the squat dark tower itself in the midst
+of the chin-upon-hand hills, and the world and his friends
+sitting about to see him fail.  He saw them, and he knew them
+all, and yet, with Childe Roland,
+
+    Dauntless the slughorn to his lips he set,
+    And blew.
+
+And incidentally, when he got well and returned to school, he
+entered on a period of learning his lessons, for he thought
+that these might one day be of use to him in his chosen line.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Senator St. John, for he was at heart democratic, and heard
+little of Aladdin that was not to Aladdin's credit,
+derigorized the taboo which he had once placed on Aladdin's
+and Margaret's friendship, and allowed the young man to come
+occasionally to the house, and occasionally loaned him books.
+Margaret was really at the bottom of this, but she stayed
+comfortably at the bottom, and teased her father to do the
+needful, and he, wrapped up in the great issues which were
+threatening to divide the country, complied.  In those days
+the senator's interests extended far beyond his family,
+Margaret and the three powerful sons who were building a
+reputation for the firm of John St. John & Brothers, lawyers
+in Portland.  He gave Aladdin leave to come and go, even
+smiled grimly as he did so, and, except at those moments when
+he met him face to face, forgot that Aladdin existed.
+Margaret enjoyed Aladdin hugely, and unconsciously sat for the
+heroine of every novel he began, and the inspiration of every
+verse that he wrote.  When Aladdin reached his eighteenth year
+and Margaret her sixteenth there was such a delightful and
+strong friendship between them that the other young people of
+the town talked.  Margaret in her heart of hearts was fonder
+of Aladdin than of anybody else--when she was with him, or
+under the immediate influence of having been with him, for
+nobody else had such extraordinary ideas, or such a fund of
+amusing vitality, or such fascinating moods.  Like every one
+with a touch of the Celt in him, Aladdin was by turns
+gloomiest and most unfortunate of all mortals upon whom the
+sun positively would not shine, or the gayest of the gay.
+From his droll manner of singing a song, to the seriousness
+with which he sometimes bore all the sufferings of all the
+world, he seemed to her a most complex and unusual individual.
+But his spells were of the instant, and her thoughts were very
+often on that beautiful young man, Manners, who, having
+completed his course at the law school, was coming to spend a
+month before he should begin to practise.  Since his first
+visit years ago, Manners, now a grown man of twenty, had spent
+much of many of his vacations with the St. Johns.  The senator
+was obliged, as well as his limitations would allow, to take
+the place of a mother to Margaret, and though it was barely
+guessable from his words or actions, he loved Peter Manners
+like a son, and had resolved, almost since the beginning, to
+end by having him for one.  And the last time that Manners had
+visited them in Washington, St. John had seen to it that he
+shook hands with all the great men who were making history.
+Once the senator and Margaret had visited the Manners in New
+York.  That had been a bitter time for Aladdin, for while all
+the others of his age were sniffing timidly at love and life,
+he had found his grand passion early and stuck to it, and was
+now blissful with hope and now acrid with jealousy.  Peter
+Manners he hated with a green and jealous hatred.  And if
+Peter Manners had any of the baser passions, he divined this,
+and hated Aladdin back, but rather contemptuously.  They met
+occasionally, and the meetings, always in the presence of
+Margaret, were never very happy.  She was woman enough to
+rejoice at being a bone of contention, and angel enough to
+hate seeing good times spoiled.
+
+But it was hard on Aladdin.  He could go to her house almost
+when he liked, and be welcomed by her, but to her father and
+the rest of the household he was not especially welcome.  They
+were always polite to him, and always considerate, and he
+felt--quite rightly--that he was merely tolerated, as a more
+or less presentable acquaintance of Margaret's.  Manners, on
+the other hand, and it took less intuition to know it, was not
+only greatly welcome to Margaret, but to all the others--from
+the gardener up to the senator.  Manners' distinction of
+manner, his wellbred, easy ways, his charmingly enunciative
+and gracious voice, together with his naive and simple nature,
+went far with people's hearts.  Aladdin bitterly conceded
+every advantage to his rival except that of mind.  To this,
+for he knew even in his humble moments that he himself had it,
+he clung tenaciously.  Mrs. Brackett, with a sneaking
+admiration for Peter Manners, whom she had once seen on the
+street, had Aladdin's interests well in heart, and the lay of
+the matter well in hand.  She put it like this to a friendly
+gossip:
+
+"I guess' Laddin O'Brien's 'bout smaht enough to go a long
+ways further than fine clothes and money and a genealogical
+past will carry a body.  He writes sometimes six and eight big
+sides of paper up in a day, and if he ain't content with that
+he just tears it up and goes at it again.  There won't be
+anybody'll go further in this world than 'Laddin O'Brien, and
+you can say I said so--"
+
+Here under oath of secrecy Mrs. Brackett lowered her voice and
+divulged a secret:
+
+"He got a letter this mornin' sayin' that the Portland'spy' is
+goin' to print three poems he sent 'em, and enclosin' three
+dollars to pay for 'em.  I guess beginnin' right now he could
+go along at that rate and make mebbe five or six hundred
+dollars a year.  Poetry's nothin' to him; he can write it
+faster than you and I can baste."
+
+At the very moment of this adoring act of divulgence Aladdin
+was in the parlor, giving his first taste of success a musical
+soul, and waiting--waiting--waiting until it should be late
+enough in the day for him to climb the hill to the St. Johns'
+and hand over the Big News to Margaret.  And as he sat before
+the piano, demipatient and wholly joyful, his fingers twinkled
+the yellowed and black keys into fits of merriment, or, after
+an abrupt pause, built heap upon heap of bass chords.  Then
+the mood would change and, to a whanging accompaniment, he
+would chant, recitative fashion, the three poems which alone
+he had made.
+
+The day waned, and it was time to go and tell Margaret.  His
+way lay past the railway-station, under the "Look out for the
+locomotive" sign, across the track, and up the hill.  In the
+air was the exhilarating evening cool of June, and the
+fragrance of flowers, which in the north country, to make up
+for the shorter tale of their days, bloom bigger and smell
+sweeter than any other flowers in the world.  Even in the
+dirty paved square fronting the station was a smell of summer
+and flowers.  You could see people's faces lighten and sniff
+it, as they got out of the hot, cindery coaches of the
+five-forty, which had just rolled in.
+
+The St. Johns' fine pair of bays and their open carriage were
+drawn up beside the station.  The horses were entering a
+spirited, ground-pawing protest against the vicinity of that
+alway inexplicable and snorting monster on wheels.  On the
+platform, evidently waiting for some one to get off the train,
+stood St. John and Margaret.  She looked much fresher and
+sweeter than a rose, and Aladdin noted that she was wearing
+her hair up for the first time.  Her dress was a floaty white
+affair with a blue ribbon round it, and her beautiful, gay
+young face flushed with excitement and anticipation till it
+sparkled.  There was a large crowd getting off the train, at
+that aggravating rate of progression with which people
+habitually leave a crowded public conveyance or a theater, and
+Margaret and her father were looking through the windows of
+the cars to see if they could catch a glimpse of whom they
+sought.  Suddenly the senator broke into a smile and waved his
+cane.  The action was so unusual for him that it looked
+grotesque.  Margaret stood on tiptoe and waved her hand, and a
+presentiment came to Aladdin and took away all his joy.
+
+Peter Manners, looking fresh and clean in spite of his long,
+dusty ride, got off the train and made a hilarious rush for
+his friends.  He shook hands with Margaret, then with the
+senator, and turned again to Margaret.  She was altogether too
+pretty, and much too glad to see him.  In the excitement of
+the moment it couldn't be borne, and he kissed her.  Then they
+both laughed, and the senator laughed, for he was glad.  He
+put his great hand on Manners' shoulder, and laughing and
+talking, the three went to the carriage.  Then the senator
+remembered that the checks had been forgotten, and against a
+voluble protest he secured them from Manners, and went after
+an expressman.  Having found the expressman--one of his
+constituents and a power in the town,--he handed him the
+checks, a fifty-cent piece, and a ponderous joke as old as
+Xerxes, at which the expressman roared.  Manners stood by the
+carriage and looked at Margaret.  "Lord God," he thought, "it
+has come at last!" and they grinned at each other.
+
+"Mmm!" said Margaret, who stood for the glory that was Greece
+and the grandeur that was Rome.  She had not expected to be so
+glad to see him.
+
+Meanwhile Aladdin had turned and was going home.
+
+Margaret caught sight of his back, and the pitiful little
+droop in the usually erect shoulders, and she divined like a
+flash, and called after him.  He pretended not to hear and
+went on.  In his pocket was the editor's letter which he had
+designed to show her.  It had lain down and died.
+
+"Why does that man hate me so?" said Manners.
+
+A little of the joy of meeting had gone.  A cloud passed over
+the sun, and the earth was darkened.  Many drops of rain began
+to fall, each making a distinct splash as it struck.  One
+began to smell the disturbed dust.  But the flowers continued
+to send up their incense to heaven, and Manners put his light
+overcoat about Margaret.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Aladdin had a large acquaintance in the town among all sorts
+of men, and, as he went home sorrowfully in the rain, he met a
+youth, older than himself, who had an evil notoriety; for
+being born with brains, of respectable people, and
+propitiously launched on the world, he had begun in his early
+teens, and in the face of the most heartrending solicitude, to
+drink himself to death.  The miserable part of it was that
+everybody loved him when he was sober, and out of
+consideration to his family still asked him to the best that
+the town could do in the way of parties and entertainments.
+He was a good-looking young man with a big frame and a pale
+face.  His real name was William Addison Larch, but he was
+better known as "Beau Larch."  He had a nervous, engaging
+smile, of which he made frequent use.
+
+"My word, Aladdin," he said, "you look sick as a dog.  Come
+with me and take a snifter for it."
+
+Aladdin hesitated a moment.  And as soon as he had thoroughly
+made up his mind that it was wrong to say so, he said:
+
+"I believe I will."  The Celt in him was feeling suicidal.
+They went into the ground-floor room of a house where liquor
+was sold.
+
+"For me, whisky," said Beau Larch.
+
+"The same for me," said Aladdin, with something suspiciously
+like a gulp.  The first drink which a man takes against his
+better judgment is a grisly epoch in his life.  Aladdin
+realized this, and was at once miserable and willing that it
+should be so.
+
+"To those that love us!" said Beau Larch.
+
+Aladdin put down his liquor without grimace or gasp.
+
+Beau Larch paid.
+
+In Aladdin's pocket were three dollars, the first mile-post on
+the steep road to his ideal.  He felt, to be sure that they
+were there.
+
+"Now you 'll have one with me," he said.
+
+When the sudden rain-storm had rained and thundered and
+lightened itself out, they went to another saloon, and from
+there to the Boat Club, of which Beau Larch was a member and
+whither he asked Aladdin to supper.  Fishes and lobsters and
+clams were the staple articles of Boat Club suppers, and over
+savory messes of these, helped down with much whisky and
+water, Aladdin and Beau Larch made the evening spin.  Aladdin,
+talking eagerly and with the naivete of a child, wondered why
+he had never liked this man so much before.  And Larch told
+the somewhat abject story of his life three times with an
+introduction of much racy anecdote.
+
+Aladdin's head held surprisingly well.  Every now and then he
+would hand himself an inward congratulation on the alertness
+and clearness of his mind, and think what a fine constitution
+he must have.  They got to singing after a while, and reciting
+poems, of which each knew a quantity by heart.  And, oddly
+enough, Aladdin, though he had been brought up to speak sound
+American, developed in his cups, and afterward clung to, in
+moments of exhilaration or excitement, an indescribably faint
+but perfectly distinct Hibernian accent.  It was the heritage
+to which he was heir, and made his eager and earnest rendering
+of "Annabel Lee" so pathetic that Beau Larch wept, and knocked
+a glass off the table. . . .
+
+Men came and sat with them, and Aladdin discovered in himself
+what he had hitherto never suspected--the power of becoming
+heart-to-heart friends with strangers in two seconds.
+
+Aladdin was never able to remember just how or when or with
+whom they left the Boat Club.  He only remembered walking and
+walking and talking and talking, and finally arguing a knotty
+question, on which all defended the same side, and then
+sitting down on the steps of a house in a low quarter of the
+town, and pouring the ramifications of all his troubles into
+the thoroughly sympathetic if somewhat noncomprehending ears
+of Beau Larch.  He talked long and became drunker as he
+talked, while Larch became soberer.  Then Aladdin remembered
+that the door at the top of the steps had opened, and a frowzy
+head had been stuck out, and that a brassy voice, with
+something at once pathetic and wheedling in it, had said:
+
+"Aren't you coming in, boys?"
+
+Then Aladdin remembered that Beau Larch and he had had angry
+words, and that Beau Larch had told him not to make an ass of
+himself, and for heaven's sake to go home.  To which Aladdin
+had retorted that he was old enough to know what was good for
+him, and hated the world and didn't give a damn who knew it,
+and wouldn't go home.  Aladdin could swear that after that he
+only closed his eyes for a second to shut out something or
+other, and that when he opened them, the reverberation of a
+door closing was in his ears.  But for all that Beau Larch had
+gone, and was to be seen neither up the street nor down.
+Although his own was past mending, Beau Larch, drunk as he
+was, had done a good deed that night, for he had guarded a
+precious innocence against the assaults of a drunken little
+Irish boy who was feeling down about something--a girl named
+something or other, Beau Larch thought, and another boy named
+something or other.  The next day Beau had forgotten even that
+much.
+
+Aladdin thought that Larch was hiding in jest.  He arose
+unsteadily and wandered off in search of him.  After a time he
+found himself before the door of his own house.  There were
+lights in the parlor, and Aladdin became almost sober.  He
+realized with a thrill of stricken conscience that Mrs.
+Brackett was sitting up for him, and he was afraid.  He tried
+the front door and found it unlocked.  He went in.  On the
+right, the door leading into the parlor stood open.  On the
+table burned a lamp.  Beside the table in the crushed plush
+rocker sat Mrs. Brackett.  Her spectacles were pushed high up
+on her forehead.  Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was
+slightly open.  From the corners of her eyes red marks ran
+down her cheeks.  Her thin gray hair was in disarray.  In her
+lap, open, lay her huge family Bible; a spray of pressed
+maidenhair fern marked the place.
+
+Aladdin, somewhat sobered by now, and already stung with the
+anguish of remorse, tiptoed into the parlor and softly blew
+out the light; but the instant before he did so he glanced
+down at the Bible in the good lady's lap and saw that she had
+been reading about the prodigal son.  Great tears ran out of
+Aladdin's eyes.  He went up-stairs, weeping and on tiptoe, and
+as he passed the door of his brother's room he heard a stir
+within.
+
+"Is that you, 'Laddin?"
+
+"Sssh, darlint," said Aladdin; "you'll wake Mother Brackett."
+
+In his own room there was a lamp burning low, and on his
+bureau was a note for him from Margaret:
+
+DEAR ALADDIN: Papa wants you to come up and have supper with
+us.  Peter Manners is here, and I think it will be fun.
+Please do come, and remember a lot of foolish songs to sing.
+Why wouldn't you speak to me?  It hurts so when you act like
+that .  .  .  .
+
+Aladdin, kissing the note, went down on his knees and twice
+began to pray, "O God--O God!"  He could say no more, but all
+the penitence and heartburnings of his soul were in his
+prayer.  Later he lay on his bed staring into a darkness which
+moved in wheels, and he kept saying to the darkness:
+
+    "Neither the angels in Heaven above,
+       Nor the demons down under the sea,
+     Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
+       Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."
+
+Late in the still morning he awoke, grieving and hurt, for he
+did not see how he should ever face Mrs. Brackett, or his
+brother, or Margaret, or himself, or anybody ever again.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+There was in town at this time what passed for a comic-opera
+troupe, and Margaret and her father, by way of doing honor to
+their guest, invited all the young people to go to the
+performance and attend a supper afterward.  The party occupied
+the three foremost rows in the music-hall, and Aladdin sat
+next to Margaret, and Manners sat upon the other side.
+
+The hero of the piece was a jovial big rascal with a spirited
+voice, and much byplay which kept his good-natured audience in
+titters--from the young gentlemen and little shrieks--from the
+young ladies.  Mr. Blythoe, the hero, when the curtain had
+fallen upon what the management was pleased to call the second
+act, consented, in response to continued applause, due to a
+double back somersault and two appropriate remarks fired off
+in midair (this was his great psychic moment), to make a
+little speech and sing a song.  His speech, though
+syntactically erratic, was delivered in a loud, frank way that
+won everybody's heart, and in closing he said:
+
+"Three nights ago I met with a young feller in this tow--city
+[applause], and when we had taken one together for luck
+[titters from the young gentlemen, who wanted one another to
+know that they knew what he meant], he made me the loan of the
+song I'm a-going to sing.  He made up the words and the tune
+of this song hisself, and he's right here in this audience."
+This gave an opportunity for some buffoonery among the young
+gentlemen.  Mr. Blythoe looked for one instant straight at
+Aladdin, and Aladdin went into a cold sweat, for he began to
+recollect that somewhere on a certain awful night he had taken
+drinks with Mr. Blythoe and had sung him songs.  Mr. Blythoe
+went on:
+
+"This young gentleman said I specially wasn't to mention his
+name, and I won't, but I want all you ladies and gentlemen to
+know that this here beautiful ballad was composed right here
+in this tow--city [applause] by a citizen of this city.  And
+here goes."
+
+Then Mr. Blythoe did a wonderful thing.  Much was owing to the
+words and air, but a little something to the way in which Mr.
+Blythoe sang.  He took his audience with the first bar, and
+had some of them crying when he was through.  And the song
+should have been silly.  It was about a gay, gay young dog of
+a crow, that left the flock and went to a sunny land and lived
+a mad, mad life; and finally, penitent and old, came home to
+the north country and saw his old playmates in the distance
+circling about the old pine-tree, but was too weak to reach
+them, or to call loud enough for them to hear, and so lay down
+and died, died, died.  The tune was the sweetest little
+plaintive wail, and at the end of each stanza it died, died,
+till you had to cry.
+
+Mr. Blythoe received tremendous applause, but refused to
+encore.  He winked to Aladdin and bowed himself off.  Then
+Aladdin executed an unparalleled blush.  He could feel it
+start in the small of his back and spread all over him--up
+under the roots of his hair to the top of his head.  He should
+have felt proud, instead of which he was suffused with shame.
+Margaret caught sight of his face.
+
+"What is it, Aladdin?" she said in a whisper.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Won't you tell me?"
+
+"It's nothing."  He got redder and redder.
+
+"Please."
+
+With downcast eyes he shook his head.  She looked at him
+dubiously and a little pathetically for a moment.  Then she
+said, "Silly goose," and turned to Manners.
+
+"Poor old crow!" said Manners.  "I had one, Margaret, when I
+was little; he had his wings clipped and used to follow me
+like a dog, and one day he saw some of his old friends out on
+the salt-marsh, and he hopped out to talk it over with them,
+and they set upon him and killed him.  And I couldn't get
+there quick enough to help him--I beg your pardon."  He picked
+up a fan and handed it to the girl on his left, and she,
+having dropped it on purpose, blushed, thanked him, and
+giggled.  Manners turned to Margaret again.  "Ever since
+then," he said, "when I have a gun in my hand and see a crow,
+I want to kill him for the sake of the crows that killed mine,
+and to let him go for the sake of mine, who was such a nice
+old fellow.  So it's an awful problem."
+
+Aladdin sat and looked straight before him.  "Is real fame as
+awful as this?" he thought.
+
+Somebody clapped him on the shoulder, and a hearty voice,
+something the worse for wear, said loudly in his ear, "Bully,
+Aladdin, bully!"
+
+Aladdin looked up and recognized that bad companion, Beau
+Larch.
+
+"That's all right," Aladdin tried to say, but Mr. Larch would
+not be downed.
+
+"Wasn't it bully, Margaret?" he said.
+
+"Oh--hallo--hallo, Beau!" said she, starting and turning round
+and collecting her wits.  "What?  Wasn't what bully?"
+
+Aladdin frowned at Larch with all the forbiddingness that he
+could muster, but Larch was imperturbable.
+
+"Why, Aladdin's song!" he said.  "You know, the one about the
+old crow--the one the man just sang."
+
+Here a young lady, over whom Beau Larch was leaning, confided
+to her escort in an audible, nervous voice that she knew Beau
+Larch had been drinking, but she wouldn't say why she knew
+--anybody could see he had; and then she sniffed with her nose
+by way of indicating that seeing was not the only or best
+method of telling.
+
+"You don't mean to say--"said Margaret to Aladdin, and looked
+him in the eyes.  "Why, Aladdin!" she said.  And then:
+"Peter--Peter--'Laddin wrote it, he did.  Isn't it gr-reat!"
+
+And Peter, rising to the occasion, said, "Bully," and "I
+thought it was great," with such absolute frankness and
+sincerity that Aladdin's heart almost warmed toward him. It was
+presently known all over the house that Aladdin had written the
+song. And some of the more clownish of the young people called
+for Author, Author. Aladdin hung his head.
+
+At supper at the St. Johns' later was a crisp, brisk gentleman
+with grayish hair, who talked in a pleasant, dry way.  Aladdin
+learned that it was Mr. Blankinship, editor and proprietor of
+the Portland "Spy."  Almost immediately on learning this
+important item, he saw Mr. Blankinship exchange a word with
+Margaret and come toward him.
+
+"Mr. O'Brien?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"The same that sent us three poems a while ago?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And you wrote that song we heard to-night?"
+
+"Yes, sir." Aladdin was now fiery red.
+
+"What do you do for a living?"
+
+"I've just finished school," said Aladdin.  "And I don't know
+what to do."
+
+"Newspaper work appeal to you?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Timid as a coot," thought Mr. Blankinship.
+
+"Write easily?" he said.  "Fast--short words?"
+
+Aladdin thought a moment.  "Yes, sir," he said coolly.
+
+"Less timid than a coot," thought Mr. Blankinship.
+
+"Willing to live in Portland?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I'll give you five dollars a week and give you a trial."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+"Can you get moved and start work Monday?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Mr. Blankinship smiled cheerfully.
+
+"Pretty entertainment, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, O'Brien, see you Monday; hope we get on." Mr.
+Blankinship nodded pleasantly and passed up the room to the
+punch, muttering as he went, "Writes better than talks--dash
+of genius--more or less timid than a coot."
+
+Aladdin went quickly to find Margaret.  He traced her to the
+pantry, where she was hurrying the servant who had charge of
+the ice-cream.  Aladdin waited until the servant had gone out
+with a heaping tray.
+
+"Margaret," he said, "I'm going away to live."
+
+He spoke in the flat, colorless voice with which a little
+child announces that it has hurt itself.
+
+"What do you mean, Aladdin?" She changed color slightly.
+
+"Only that I've got to make a living, Margaret, and it's on a
+paper, so I ought to be glad."
+
+"Aren't you glad, Aladdin?"
+
+"A little."
+
+"Aladdin--"
+
+"Margaret--O Margaret--"
+
+She read in his eyes what was coming.
+
+"Not now, Aladdin," she said.
+
+"Not now--dear Aladdin."
+
+"Then you know?"
+
+"I've always known, Aladdin, and been grateful and that
+proud."
+
+"Will there never be any chance for me, Margaret?"
+
+"Aladdin, I think I like you better than anybody else in the
+world--"
+
+"Darling--" he had never supposed that it could be said so
+easily; he leaned toward her.
+
+"No," she said suddenly; "I've got to go and see after all
+those foolish people."
+
+"Just for the sake of old times, and now, and new times--"
+
+She hesitated, reddened a little, and then, as sweetly and
+innocently as a child, put up her lips for him to kiss.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Hannibal St. John's campaign for reelection to the senatorship
+was, owing to a grievous error in tact, of doubtful issue.  A
+hue and cry arose against him among his constituents, and
+things in general fell out so unhappily that it looked toward
+the close of the contest as if he would be obliged to sit idle
+and dangle his heels, while the two halves of the country,
+pushing against each other, were rising in the middle like the
+hinge of a toggle-joint into the most momentous crisis in the
+nation's history.  It looked as if the strong man, with his
+almost blasphemous intolerance of disunion, his columnlike
+power of supporting, and his incomparable intellect, was to
+stand in the background and watch the nightmare play from
+afar.  He fought for his place in the forefront of the battle
+with a great fervor of bitterness, and the possibility of
+defeat weighed upon his glowering soul like a premature day of
+judgment.  He knew himself to be the one man for the
+opportunity, and could his true feelings have found utterance,
+they would have said, "Damn us everlastingly in hell, but
+don't shelve us now!"
+
+Opposed to St. John was a Mr. Bispham, of about quarter his
+height intellectually and integrally--a politician, simple,
+who went to war for loot.  But he was blessed with a
+tremendous voice and an inexhaustible store of elemental,
+fundamental humor, upon the waves of which the ship bearing
+his banner floated high.  It seemed that because of one
+glaring exhibition of tactlessness, and a lack of humor, a
+really important, valuable, and honest man was to lose the
+chance of serving his country to a designing whipper-snapper,
+who was without even the saving grace of violent and virulent
+prejudices.  And so the world goes.  It seemed at one time
+that St. John's chance was a ghost of a chance, and his
+friends, sons, and relatives, toiling headstrong by night and
+day, were brought up at the verge of despair.  To make the
+situation even more difficult, St. John himself was prostrated
+with the gout, so that his telling oratory and commanding
+personality could not be brought to bear.  Margaret was never
+far from her father's side, and she worked like a dog for him,
+writing to dictation till her hands became almost useless, and
+when the spasms of pain were great, leaving her work to kiss
+his old brow.
+
+It was at this time that people all over the State began to
+take up a song with an inimitably catching tune.  The words of
+this song held up Mr. Bispham in so shrewdly true and
+farcically humorous a light that even his own star began to
+titter and threatened to slip from its high place in the
+heavens.  The song fell so absolutely on the head of the nail
+that Mr. Bispham, when he heard it for the first time, was
+convulsed with anger and talked of horse-whips.  The second
+time he heard it, he drew himself up with dignity and
+pretended not to notice, and the third time he broke into a
+cold sweat, for he began to be afraid of those words and that
+tune.  At a mass-meeting, while in the midst of a voluble
+harangue, somebody in the back of the hall punctuated--an
+absurd statement, which otherwise might have passed unnoticed,
+by whistling the first bar of the song.  Mr. Bispham faced the
+tittering like a man, and endeavored to rehabilitate himself.
+But his hands had slipped on the handle of the audience, and
+the forensic rosin of Demosthenes would not have enabled him
+to regain his grip.  He was cruelly assured of the fact by the
+hostile and ready-witted whistler.  Again Mr. Bispham
+absurded.  This time the tune broke out in all parts of the
+hall and was itself punctuated by catcalls and sotto-voce
+insults delivered with terrific shouts.  Mr. Bispham's speech
+was hurriedly finished, and the peroration came down as flat
+as a skater who tries a grape-vine for the first time.  He
+left the hall hurriedly, pale and nervous.  The tune followed
+him down the street and haunted him to his room.  The alarming
+takingness of it had gotten in at his ear, and as he was
+savagely undressing he caught himself in the traitorous act of
+humming it to himself.
+
+Among others to leave the hall was a tall, slim young man with
+freckles across the bridge of his nose and very bright blue
+eyes.  A party of young men accompanied him, and all were a
+little noisy, and, as they made the street, broke lustily into
+the campaign song.  People said, "That's him," "That's
+O'Brien," "That's Aladdin O'Brien," "That's the man wrote it,"
+and the like.  The young men disappeared down the street
+singing at the tops of their voices, with interlardations of
+turbulent, mocking laughter.
+
+Aladdin's song went all over the North, and his name became
+known in the land.
+
+Hannibal St. John was not musical.  There were only four
+tunes, and three of them were variations of "Carry Me Back to
+Old Virginia," that he recognized when he heard them.  As he
+lay on his bed of pain, he heard the shrill whistle of his
+gardener piping in the garden below.  Unconsciously the
+senator's well hand marked the time.  All day, as he came and
+went about his business, the gardener kept whistling that
+tune, and the senator heard and reheard ever with increasing
+pleasure.  And this was an extraordinary thing, for it was as
+difficult or nearly so to move Hannibal St. John with music as
+it must have been for Orpheus to get himself approached by
+rocks and stones and trees, and far more difficult than it
+ever was for the Pied Piper to achieve a following of brats
+and rats.
+
+Margaret had been for a drive with a girl friend.  She came
+home and to her father's side in great spirits.
+
+"Oh, papa," she cried, "will you do me a favor?"
+
+She read consent.
+
+"Claire has got the wonderfulest song, and I want you to let
+her come in and sing it for you."
+
+"A song?" said the senator, doubtfully.
+
+"Papa de-e-ear, please."
+
+He smiled grimly.
+
+"If Claire will not be shocked by my appearance," he said
+against hope.
+
+"Rubbish," cried Margaret, and flew out of the room.
+
+
+There were a few preliminary gasps and giggles in the hall,
+and the two maidens, as sedate and demure as mice, entered.
+Claire was a little party, with vivacious manners and a
+comical little upturned face.
+
+"How do you do, senator?" she said.  "I'm so sorry you're laid
+up.  Isn't it lovely out?"  She advanced and shook his well
+hand.
+
+"Won't you take a chair?" said the senator.
+
+"I just ran in for a moment.  Margaret and I thought maybe
+you'd like to hear the new campaign song that everybody's
+singing.  My brother brought it up from Portland--" she
+paused, out of breath.
+
+"It would afford me great pleasure," said the senator.
+
+And forthwith Claire sang in a rollicking voice.  The tune was
+the same as that which the gardener had been whistling.  St.
+John recognized it in spite of the difference in the mediums
+and smiled.  Then he smiled because of the words, and
+presently he laughed.  It was the first real pleasure he had
+had in many a day.
+
+"Everybody is wild about it," said Claire, when she had
+finished.
+
+The senator was shaking with laughter.
+
+"That's good," he said, "that's good."
+
+"Papa," said Margaret, when Claire had gone, "who do you think
+wrote that song?"
+
+"I don't know," said the senator.  "But it's good."
+
+"Aladdin wrote it," said Margaret.
+
+"Upon my word!" said the senator.
+
+Margaret knelt and threw her arms about her father's neck and
+blushed a lovely blush.
+
+"Isn't it splendid?"
+
+There was a ring at the front door, and a telegram was brought
+in.
+
+"Read it, Peggy," said the senator.  He used that name only
+when moved about something.  The despatch was from the
+senator's youngest son, Hannibal, and read:
+
+    Do not worry; we are singing Bispham up a tree.
+
+"And Aladdin wrote the song!" cried Margaret.  "Aladdin wrote
+it!"
+
+The senator's face clouded for a moment.  He forced the cloud
+to pass.
+
+"We must thank him," he said.  "We must thank him."
+
+Senator St. John was reelected by a small majority.  Everybody
+admitted that it was due to Aladdin O'Brien's song.  It was
+impossible to disguise the engaging childishness of the vote.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+As he went to his desk in the back room of the Portland "Spy"
+offices the morning after the election, Aladdin had an evil
+headache, and a subconscious hope that nobody would speak to
+him suddenly.  He felt that his arms and legs might drop off
+if anybody did, and he could have sworn that he saw a gray
+sparrow with blue eyes run into a dark corner, and turn into a
+mouse.  But he was quite free from penitence, as the occasion
+of this last offense had been joy and triumph, whereas that of
+his first had been sorrow.  He lighted a bad cigar, put off
+his editorial till later, and covered a whole sheet of paper
+with pictures like these:
+
+(Transcriber's note: These are simple sketches of birds and
+animals.)
+
+He looked back with a certain smug satisfaction upon a
+hilarious evening beginning with a dinner at the club, which
+some of the older adherents of St. John had given him in
+gratitude for the part he had taken in the campaign.  He
+remembered that he had not given a bad exhibition, and that
+noble prophecies had been made of his future by gentlemen in
+their cups, and that he himself, when just far enough gone to
+be courageous without being silly, had made a snappy little
+speech of thanks which had been received with great applause,
+and that later he had sung his campaign song and others, and
+that finally, in company with an ex-judge, whose hat was also
+decorated with a wreath of smilax, he had rolled amiably about
+the town in a hack, going from one place where drinks could be
+gotten to another, and singing with great fervor and
+patriotism:
+
+    Zhohn Brownzh bozhy liezh a mole-ring in zhe grave.
+
+Aladdin thought over these things with pleasure, for he had
+fallen under the dangerous flattery of older men, and with
+less pleasure of the editorial which it was his immediate
+business to write.  His brisk, crisp chief, Mr. Blankinship,
+came in for a moment, walking testily and looking like the
+deuce.
+
+"So you've showed up, Aladdin, have you?" he said.  "That's
+young blood.  If any question of politics--I mean policy
+--arises, I leave it absolutely to you.  I'm going back to
+bed.  Can't you stop smoking that rotten cigar?"
+
+Aladdin laughed aloud, and Mr. Blankinship endeavored to
+smile.
+
+"Somewhere," he said, "in this transcendentally beautiful
+continent, Aladdin, there may be some one that feels worse
+than I do, but I doubt it."  He turned to go.
+
+"Won't Mr. Orde be here either?" said Aladdin.
+
+"No; he's home in bed.  You're editor-in-chief and everything
+else for the day, see?  And I wish I was dead."  Mr.
+Blankinship nodded, very slightly, for it hurt, and went out.
+
+The misery of others is a great cure: with the first sight
+of Mr. Blankinship, Aladdin's headache had gone, and
+he now pounced upon fresh paper, got a notion out of the
+God-knows-where, wrote his editorial at full speed, and
+finished it without once removing the cigar from his mouth.
+
+He had just done when the shrewd, inky little boy, who did
+everything about the "Spy" offices which nobody else would do,
+entered and said that a gentleman wanted to speak with Mr.
+O'Brien.  Aladdin had the gentleman shown up, and recognized
+the oldest of Hannibal St. John's sons; he knew them well by
+sight, but it so.  happened that he had never met them.  They
+were the three biggest and most clean-cut young men in Maine,
+measuring between six feet three and four; erect, massive,
+utterly composed, and, if anything, a little stronger than so
+many dray-horses.  They were notable shots, great fishermen,
+and the whole State was beginning to speculate with excitement
+about their respective futures and the present almost
+glittering success of the law firm which they composed.  The
+oldest was the tallest and the strongest.  He had been known
+to break horseshoes and to tear a silver dollar in two.  Iron
+was as sealing-wax in his huge hands.  His habits were
+Spartan.  The second son was almost a replica of the first--a
+little darker and a little less vivid.  The third was like the
+others; but his face was handsomer, and not so strong.  He was
+of a more gentle and winning disposition, for his life was not
+ignorant of the frailties.  The girl to whom he had been
+engaged had died, and that had left a kind of sweetness,
+almost beseechingness, in his manner, very engaging in so tall
+and strong a man.
+
+"Mr. O'Brien?" said John St. John.
+
+Aladdin arose and held out his long, slender hand.
+
+Aladdin had a way of moving which was very individual to
+himself, a slight, ever so slight, exaggeration of stride and
+gesture, a kind of captivating awkwardness and diffidence that
+was on the borderland of grace and assurance.  Like all
+slender people who work much with their heads, he had a strong
+grip, but he felt that his hand was as inconsistent as an eel
+when St. John's closed over it.
+
+"I came in for a moment," said St. John, "to say that we are
+all exceedingly grateful to you.  Your song was a great factor
+in my father's reelection to the Senate.  But we do not hold
+so much by the song as by the good will which you showed us in
+writing it.  I want you to understand and believe that if I
+can ever be of the slightest service to you, I will go very
+far to render it."
+
+"I'm as obliged as I can be," said Aladdin.  "It's mighty good
+of you to come and talk to me like this, and except for the
+good will I have toward all your family, I don't deserve it a
+bit."
+
+When John St. John had gone, the inky boy came to announce
+that another gentleman wished to speak with Mr. O'Brien.
+
+The second gentleman proved to be the second brother, Hamilton
+St. John.
+
+"Mr. O'Brien?" said he.
+
+Aladdin shook hands with him.
+
+"I came in for a moment," said Hamilton St. John, "for the
+pleasure of telling you how tremendously grateful we all are
+to you for your song, which was such a big factor in my
+father's redirection to the Senate.  But I want to say, too,
+that we're more grateful for your good will than for the song,
+and if I can ever do you a service, I want you to feel
+perfectly free to come and ask it of me, whatever it is."
+
+Aladdin could have laughed for joy.  Margaret did not seem so
+far away as sometimes.
+
+"I'm as obliged as I can be," he said.  "It's mighty good of
+you to come and talk to me like this, and except for the good
+will I have toward all your family, I don't deserve it a bit,
+but I appreciate it just the same."
+
+Presently Hamilton St. John departed.
+
+Again the inky boy, and this time grinning.
+
+"There's a gentleman would like to speak with you, sir," he
+said.
+
+"Show him in," said Aladdin.
+
+Hannibal St. John, Jr., entered.
+
+"O'Brien," he said, "I've often heard my sister Margaret speak
+about you, and I've been meaning for ever so long to look you
+up.  And I wish I'd done it before I had such an awfully good
+excuse as that song of yours, because I don't know how to
+thank you, quite.  But I want you to understand that if at any
+time--rubbish, you know what I mean.  Come up to the club, and
+we'll make a drink and talk things over."
+
+He drew Aladdin's arm into his, and they went out.
+
+Aladdin had never before felt so near Margaret.
+
+He returned to the office in half an hour, happy and a slave.
+Hannibal St. John, Jr., had won the heart right out of him in
+ten minutes.  He sat musing and dreaming.  Was he to be one of
+those chosen?
+
+"Gentleman to see you, sir."
+
+"Show him in."
+
+The inky snickered and hurried out.  He could be heard saying
+with importance, "This way, sir.  Look out for that press,
+sir.  It's very dark in here, sir." And then, like a smart
+flunky in a house of condition, he appeared again at the door
+and announced
+
+"Senator Hannibal St. John."
+
+Aladdin sprang up.
+
+The senator, still suffering from the gout, and leaning
+heavily on his whalebone cane, limped majestically in.  There
+was an amiability on his face, which Aladdin had never seen
+there before.  He placed a chair for his distinguished guest.
+The senator removed his high hat and stood it upon the edge of
+Aladdin's desk.
+
+"My boy," he said,--the word tingled from Aladdin's ears to
+his heart, for it was a word of great approachment and
+unbending,--"I am very grateful for your efforts in my behalf.
+I will place honor where honor is due, and say that I owe my
+recent reflection to the United States Senate not so much to
+my more experienced political friends as to you.  The present
+crisis in the affairs of the nation calls for men of feeling
+and honor, and not for politicians.  I hope that you will not
+misconstrue me into a braggart if I say from the bottom of my
+heart I believe that, in returning a man of integrity and
+tradition to his seat in the Congress of the nation, you have
+rendered a service to the nation."
+
+The senator paused, and Aladdin, still standing, waited for
+him to finish.
+
+"After a week," said the senator, "I shall return to my duties
+in Washington.  In the meanwhile, Margaret" (he had hitherto
+always referred to her before Aladdin as "my daughter") "and I
+are keeping open house, and if it will give you pleasure we
+shall be charmed" (the word fell from the senator's lips like
+a complete poem) "to have you make us a visit.  Two of my sons
+will be at home, and other young people."
+
+"Indeed, and it will give me pleasure!" cried Aladdin, falling
+into the least suspicion of a brogue.
+
+"I will write a line to your chief," continued the senator,
+"and I have reason to believe that he will see you excused.
+We shall expect you to-morrow by the fourthirty."
+
+"I'm ever so much obliged, sir," said Aladdin.
+
+"My boy," said the senator, gravely, after a full minute's
+pause, "we are all concerned in your future, which promises to
+be a brilliant one.  It rests with you.  But, if an old man
+may be permitted a word of caution, it would be this: Let your
+chief recreation lie in your work; leave the other things.  Do
+I make myself clear enough?" (Aladdin nodded guiltily.) "Leave
+the frailties to the dullards of this world."
+
+He rose to go.
+
+"My young friend," said the senator, "you have my best
+wishes."
+
+Grimacing with the pain in his foot, limping badly, but always
+stately and impressive,--almost superimpending,--Hannibal St.
+John moved slowly out of the office.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+The weather turned suddenly gusty and cold, and that afternoon
+it began to snow, and it kept on snowing.  All night fine dry
+flakes fell in unexampled profusion, and by morning the face of
+the land was many inches deep.  Nor did the snow then cease.
+All the morning it continued to fall with vigor.  The train by
+which Aladdin was to go to the St. Johns' left at two-thirty,
+arriving there two hours later; and it was with numb feet and
+stinging ears that he entered the car reserved for smokers,
+and, bundling in a somewhat threadbare over coat, endeavored
+to make himself comfortable for the journey.  As the train
+creaked and jerked out of the protecting station, the storm
+smote upon the windows with a noise like thrown sand, and a
+back draft down the chimney of the iron stove in one end of
+the car sent out puffs of smutty smoke at whatever points the
+various castings of the stove came together with insufficient
+snugness.  There were but half a dozen people in the whole
+train.
+
+"Troubles, old man," said Aladdin, for so he was in the habit
+of addressing himself at moments of self-communication, "this
+is going to be the slowest kind of a trip, but we're going to
+enjoy every minute of it, because it's taking us to the place
+where we would be-God bless her!"
+
+Aladdin took a cigar from his breast pocket.
+
+"Troubles," said he, "may I offer you a smoke?  What?  Oh,
+you're very much obliged and don't mind if you do.  There you
+are, then."  Aladdin sent out a great puff of white smoke;
+this turned into a blue wraith, drifted down the aisle,
+between the seats, gathering momentum as it went, and finally,
+with the rapidity of a mint julep mounting a sucked straw (that
+isn't split) and spun long and fine, it was drawn through a
+puncture of the isinglass in the stove door and went up the
+chimney in company with other smoke, and out into the storm.
+Aladdin, full of anticipation and glee, smoked away with great
+spirit.  Presently, for the car was empty but for himself,
+Aladdin launched into the rollicking air of "Red Renard"
+
+   "Three scarlet huntsmen rode up to White Plains
+    With a carol of voices and jangle of chains,
+    For the morning was blue and the morning was fair,
+    And the word ran, "Red Renard" is waiting us there."
+
+He puffed at his cigar a moment to be sure that its fire
+should not flag, and sang on:
+
+   "The first scarlet huntsman blew into his horn,
+    Lirala, Lovely Morning, I'm glad I was born";
+    The second red huntsman he whistled an air,
+    And the third sang, "Red Renard" is waiting us there."
+
+"Just such weather as this, Troubles," he said, looking out
+into the swirl of snow.  "Just the beautifulest kind of
+cross-country weather!"  He sang on:
+
+    Three lovely ladies they met at the meet,
+    With whips in their hands and with boots on their feet;
+    And the gentlemen lifted their hats with a cheer,
+    As the girls said, "Red Renard is waiting you here."
+
+He quickened into the stanza he liked best:
+
+    Three scarlet huntsmen rode off by the side
+    Of three lovely ladies on horses of pride.
+    Said the first, "Call me Ellen"; the second, "I'm Claire";
+    Said the third, "I'm Red Renard--so called from my hair."
+
+The train, which had been running more slowly, drew up with a
+chug, and some minutes passed before it again gathered itself
+and lurched on.
+
+"That's all right," said Aladdin.  He was quite warm now, and
+thoroughly happy.
+
+    Three scarlet huntsmen rode home from White Plains,
+    With its mud on their boots, and its girls on their brains;
+    And the first sang of Ellen, the second of Claire,
+    But the third sang, "Red Renard is waiting back there."
+
+He made a waggish face to finish with:
+
+    Three scarlet huntsmen got into frock-coats,
+    And they pinched their poor feet, and they tortured their throats;
+    And the first married Ellen, the second wed Claire,
+    While the third said, "Re Renar izh waishing back zhere."
+
+He assumed the expression for a moment of one astutely drunk.
+
+"A bas!" he said, for this much of the French language was his
+to command, and no more.  He turned and attempted to look out.
+He yawned.  Presently he threw away the reeking butt of his
+cigar, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.
+
+The water below the veranda was alive with struggling fishes
+in high hats and frock-coats.  Each fish had a label painted
+across his back with his name and address neatly printed on
+it, and each fish was struggling to reach a tiny minnow-hook,
+naked of bait, which dangled just out of reach above the
+water.  The baitless hook was connected by a fine line (who
+ever heard of baiting a line at the wrong end?) with
+Margaret's hand.  She had on a white dress stamped with big
+pink roses, and there was a pale-green ribbon round the middle
+of it; her hair was done up for the first time, and she was
+leaning over the railing, which was made of safety-lamps and
+stranglers alternately, painted light blue, regarding the
+struggling fishes with a look at once full of curiosity and
+pity.  Presently one of the fishes' labels soaked off, and
+went hurtling out to sea, with the fish weeping bitterly and
+following at express speed, until in less than one moment both
+label and fish were hull down below the horizon.  Then another
+label washed off, and then another and another, and fish after
+fish, in varying states of distraction, followed after and
+disappeared, until all you could see were two, whereof the one
+was labeled Manners and the other O'Brien (these continued to
+fight for the hook), and all you could hear was Neptune, from
+down, down, down in the sea, saying coquettishly to Cleopatra,
+"I'm Red Renard--so called from my hair."  And then all of a
+sudden valiant Captain Kissed-by-Margaret went by on a log
+writing mottos for the wives of famous men.  And then Manners
+and O'Brien, struggling desperately to drown each other, sank
+down, down, down, and Cleopatra could be heard saying
+perfectly logically to Neptune, "You didn't!"  And then there
+was a tremendous shower of roses, and the dream went out like
+a candle.
+
+
+Aladdin opened his eyes and stroked his chin.  He was troubled
+about the dream.  The senator had spoken to him of "others."
+Could Peter Manners possibly be there? Was that the especial
+demolishment that fate held in store for him? He was very wide
+awake now.
+
+At times, owing to the opaqueness of the storm, it was
+impossible to see out of the car window.  But there were
+moments when a sudden rush of wind blew a path for the eye,
+and by such occasional pictures--little long of the
+instantaneous--one could follow the progress of the blizzard.
+Aladdin saw a huddle of sheep big with snow; then a man
+getting into a house by the window; an ancient apple-tree with
+a huge limb torn off; two telegraph poles that leaned toward
+each other, like one man fixing another's cravat; and he
+caught glimpses of wires broken, loosened, snarled, and fuzzy
+with snow.  Then the train crawled over a remembered trestle,
+and Aladdin knew that he was within four miles of his station,
+and within three of the St. Johns' house by the best of short
+cuts across country.  He looked precisely in its direction,
+and kissed his fingers to Margaret, and wondered what she was
+doing.  Then there was a rumbling, jumping jar, and the train
+stopped.  Minute after minute went by.  Aladdin waited
+impatiently for the train to start.  The conductor passed
+hurriedly through.
+
+"What's up?" called Aladdin after him.
+
+"Up!" cried the conductor.  "We're off the track."
+
+"Can't we go on to-night?"
+
+"Nup!"  The conductor passed out of the car and banged the
+door.
+
+"Got to sit here all night!" said Aladdin.  "Not much!  Get
+up, Troubles!  If you don't think I know the way about here,
+you can stay by the stove.  I'm going to walk."
+
+Aladdin and Troubles rose, buttoned their coat, left the car,
+and set out in the direction of the St. Johns'.  Aladdin's
+watch at starting read five o'clock.
+
+"Our luggage is all checked, Troubles," he said, "and all
+we've got to face is the idea of walking three miles through
+very disagreeable weather, over a broad path that we know like
+the palm of our hand (which we don't know as well as we
+might), arriving late, wet to the skin, and without a change
+of clothes.  On the other hand, we shall deserve a long drink
+and much sympathy.  As for you, Troubles, you're the best
+company I know, and all is well."
+
+    The first scarlet huntsman blew into his horn,
+    "Lirala, Lovely Morning, I'm glad I was born."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+At first the way, lying through waist-high fir scrub, was
+pretty bad underfoot, but beyond was a stretch of fine timber,
+where the trees had done much to arrest the snow, and the
+going was not so severe.  Aladdin calculated that he should
+make the distance in an hour and a half; and when the wood
+ended, he looked at his watch and found that the first mile,
+together with only twenty-five minutes, was behind him.
+
+"That's the rate of an hour and a quarter, Troubles," he said.
+"And that's good time.  Are you listening?"
+
+But following the wood was a great open space of country
+pitched up from the surrounding levels, and naked to every
+fury of nature.  Across that upland the wind blew a wicked
+gale, scarifying the tops of knolls to the brown, dead grass,
+and filling the hollows flush with snow.  At times, to keep
+from being blown over, it was necessary to lean against the
+gusts.  Aladdin was conscious of not making very rapid
+progress, but there was something exhilarating in the
+wildness, the bitter cold, and the roar of the wind; it had an
+effect as of sea thundering upon beach, great views from
+mountain-tops, black wild nights, the coming of thunder and
+freshness after intense heat, or any of the thousand and one
+vaster demonstrations of nature.  Now and again Aladdin sang
+snatches of song:
+
+          Gaily bedight,
+         A gallant knight
+       In sunshine and shadow
+         Journeyed long,
+         Singing a song,
+       In search of El Dorado.
+
+Or from "The Mole of Marimolena"
+
+  I was turning fifty-odd when the everlasting God
+    Smote a path of molten gold across the blue,
+  Says, "There's many million men would have done the like again,
+    But you didn't, and, my man, there's hope for you.
+
+   "Start sheets and sail for the Mole--
+    For the old rotten Mole of Marimolena;
+     There's maybe some one there
+     That you're longing to treat fair,
+    On the dismal, woeful Mole of Marimolena."
+
+And other deep-sea chanteys,--the one in which the pirate
+found the Lady in the C-a-a-bin and slivered off her head, or
+back to Red Renard, or further to his own campaign song, and
+furthest of all to the bad, bad young dog of a crow.  Then he
+got quite out of breath, and pausing for a moment to catch it,
+noted for the first time the extreme bitterness of the cold.
+It stung the face like insects.  "Woof!" he said.  "And now
+for lost time."
+
+Again he stepped out, but with each step the snow became
+deeper, and presently he floundered in to his waist.  "Must be
+a ditch!" he said, turning a little to the right and
+exclaiming, "Thought so!" as the wading got shallower.
+Whereupon he stepped into a deep hole and fell.  After
+plunging and plowing about, it was brought home to him that he
+had lost the path.  Even at that the difficulty remained one
+of hard walking alone, for he had been familiar with that
+country since childhood, and knew the precise direction in
+which it was necessary for him to locomote.  It was a pity
+that the only structure in the vicinity was an ancient and
+deserted house,--it lay just off there,--as he should have
+liked to have warmed himself by a good fire before going
+farther.  He remembered that there were a partly preserved
+stove in the deserted house, broken laths, and naily boards,
+and swathes of curious old wall-papers, layer upon layer,
+which, dampening and rotting from the wall, hung raggedly
+down.  He had once explored the house with Margaret, and it
+seemed almost wise to go to the place and make a fire.  But on
+account of the delay involved and the approach of darkness, he
+discarded the notion, and, a little impatient at being badly
+used by a neighborhood he knew so well, struggled on.
+
+"Troubles," he said, "what sort of a storm is this anyway?
+Did you ever see anything quite like it round here?  Because I
+never did.  It must be like those things they have out West,
+when millions of poor little baa-sheeps and horses and cattles
+freeze to death.  I'd hate to be a horse out in this, but I
+wish I had one.  I--"
+
+If, as a child, you have ever slipped, though only an inch,
+while climbing over roofs, you will know that sudden,
+stabbing, sinking feeling that came to Aladdin and stopped the
+beating of his heart by the hairbreadth of a second.  He had
+been proceeding chin on breast, and head bent against the
+wind, or he would have seen it before, for it was a notable
+landmark in that part of the world, and showed him that he had
+been making way, not toward his destination, but toward the
+wilderness.
+
+He gazed up at the great black blasted pine, its waist the
+height of a tall tree, and its two lonely lightning-scathed
+and white arms stretched out like a malediction; and for a
+moment he had to take himself in hand.  After a little he
+mastered the fear that had seized him.
+
+"It's only a poor old lonely vegetable out in the cold," he
+said.  "And it shows us exactly where we are and exactly which
+way we have to go."
+
+He set himself right, and, with head lowered and hands
+clenched, again started on.  But he was beginning to be very
+much bored, and sensible that his legs were not accustomed to
+being used so hard.  Furthermore, there was a little
+difficulty--not by any means an insurmountable one--in
+steering straight, because of the constantly varying point of
+the compass in which the wind blew.  He went on for a long
+time .  .  .  .
+
+He began to look for the high ground to decline, as it should,
+about now, if it was the high ground he took it for.  "I ought
+to be getting somewhere," he said.
+
+And, God help him! tired out, half frozen and very foot-sore,
+he was getting somewhere, for, glancing up, he again beheld
+the gigantic and demoniac shape of the blasted pine.
+
+It is on prairies and among mountains, far from the
+habitations of men, that man is most readily terrified before
+nature, and not on the three-mile primrose way from a railway
+accident to a house-party.  But for a moment cold terror
+struck at Aladdin like a serpent, and the marrow in his bones
+froze.  Before he could succeed in reducing this awful feeling
+to one of acute anxiety alone, he had to talk to himself and
+explain things as to a child.
+
+"Then it is true, Troubles, old man," he said, "about a
+person's tendency to go to the left.  That's interesting,
+isn't it?  But what do we care?  Being gifted with a certain
+(flighty, it is true) intelligence, we will simply take pains,
+and every step pull a little to the right; and that will make
+us go straight.  Come now-keep thinking about it-every step!"
+
+As the end of the day approached, a lull came in the gale, and
+the snow fell less freely.  The consequently widened horizon
+of vision was eminently comforting, and Aladdin's unpleasant
+feeling of anxiety almost disappeared.
+
+Suddenly he was aware of a red horse.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+It was standing almost leg-clear, in an angle of what seemed a
+drifted-over snake-fence.  Its ugly, Roman-nosed head was
+thrown up and out, as if about to neigh.
+
+"Poor beastie," said Aladdin, after a start.  "You must be
+direfful cold, but we'll ride you, and that will make you
+warm, and us cold, and we'll all get along faster."
+
+Drawing near, he began to gentle the horse and call it pet
+names.  It was a huge brute, over seventeen hands high, and
+Aladdin, aided only by a rickety fence, and a pair of legs
+that would hardly support him, was appalled by the idea of
+having to climb to that lofty eminence, its back.  Without
+doubt he was dreadfully tired.
+
+"The fence will help, old man" he said.  "Here, you, pay
+attention and get over."  He tried to insinuate himself
+between the horse and the fence, but the horse did not seem
+inclined to move.
+
+"Get over, you!" he said, and gave a shove.  The horse moved a
+little, very unwillingly.  "Farther yet," said Aladdin: "Get
+over, you, get over."  Again he shoved; this time harder.  He
+slapped the great shoulder with his open hand.  And again the
+horse moved, but very slowly.  "You're an unwilling brute,
+aren't you?" he said angrily.
+
+For answer the thing tottered, and, to his horror, began to
+fall, at first slowly, but ever with accelerating speed,
+until, in the exact attitude in which it had stood by the
+fence,--the great Roman-nosed head thrown up and out, as if to
+neigh,--he beheld the horse stretched before him on the
+ground, and noted for the first time the awful death-like
+glint of the yellow teeth through the parting of the lips.
+
+He went very gravely from that place, for he had been looking
+upon death by freezing, and he himself was terribly cold,
+terribly tired, and--he admitted it now--completely lost.
+
+But he went on for a long time--four or five hundred years.
+And it grew darker and colder.
+
+He began to talk to himself, to try and steady himself, as he
+had done ever since childhood at forsaken times.
+
+"Troubles," he said, "You're full of troubles, aren't you, old
+man?  You always were.  But this is the worst.  You can't walk
+very much farther, can you?  I can't.  And if you don't get
+helped by some one pretty soon, you're going to come to the
+end of your troubles.  And, Troubles, do you know, I think
+that's what's going to happen to you and me, and I want you to
+stand up to it if it comes [gulp] and face it like a man.  Now
+let's rest a little, Troubles, will we?"
+
+Troubles and Aladdin rested a little.  When the rest was over
+they could hardly move, and they began to see the end of a
+young man that they had hoped would live a long time and be
+very happy.  They went on.
+
+"Troubles," said Aladdin, "do you suppose she knows that we
+are out here, perhaps dying?  We would know if she were,
+wouldn't we?  And do you think she cares?  Liar, you know she
+cares, and a lot.  She wouldn't be she if she didn't care.
+But we didn't think that all the years of waiting and hoping
+and loving and trying to be something would end like this, did
+we, Troubles?  We thought that it might end with the godlike
+Manners (whom we wouldn't help if he were freezing to death,
+would we?), but not like this--O Lord God, not like this! . . .
+And we weren't sure it would end with Manners; we were
+going to fight it out to a mighty good finish, weren't we,
+Troubles?  But now it's going to end in a mighty good storm,
+and you're going to die for all your troubles, Troubles . . .
+And I'm talking to you so that we won't lose our sand,
+even if we are afraid to die, and there's no one looking on."
+
+Though Aladdin stopped making talk in his head, the talk kept
+going on by itself; and he suddenly shouted aloud for it to
+stop.  Then he began to whimper and shiver, for he thought
+that his mind was going.
+
+Presently he shook himself.
+
+"Troubles," he said, "we've only a little farther to go--just
+as far as our feet will carry us, and no farther.  That's the
+proper way to finish.  And for God's sake keep sane.  We won't
+give her up yet!"
+
+Ten steps and years passed.
+
+"Troubles," said Aladdin, "we're going to call for help, and
+if it don't come, which it won't, we're going to try and be
+calm.  It seems simplest and looks best to be calm."
+
+Aladdin stood there crying aloud for the help of man, but it
+did not come.  And then he cried for the help of God.  And he
+stood there waiting--waiting for it to come.
+
+"We must help ourselves, Troubles," he said, with a desperate
+effort to be calm.  "We've got ten steps left in us.  Now,
+then, one--two--"
+
+During the taking of those ten steps the snow ceased entirely
+to fall, and black night enveloped the earth.
+
+Aladdin was all numb, and he wished to sleep, but he made the
+ten steps into eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, before his
+limbs refused to act, and he fell forward in the snow.  He
+managed to raise himself and crawl a little way.  He saw a
+light afar off, and guessing that it must be an angel, held
+out his hands to it--and one of them encountered a something
+in the dark.
+
+Even through his thick mitten it felt round and smooth and
+colder than his fingers, like a ball of ice.  Then Aladdin
+laughed aloud, for he knew that his last walk upon earth had
+been in the form of a silly circle.  He had returned to the
+dead horse, and his gloved hand was resting upon its frozen
+eye.  He shrieked with laughter and became heavy with a desire
+to sleep.
+
+He sank deliciously down, and began to see showers of roses,
+when it flashed upon him that this was not sleep, but death.
+
+It was like lifting prodigious dumb-bells to get his eyes to
+open, and a return to consciousness was like the stabbing of
+knives.  But he opened his eyes and roused himself.
+
+"I won't give her up yet," he cried.
+
+And then, by the help of God Almighty, he crawled the whole
+length of the horse.
+
+And fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+It was a miserable, undressed thing wrapped in a horse-blanket
+and a buffalo-robe that woke up in front of a red-hot stove
+and remembered that it used to be Aladdin O'Brien.  It had a
+dreadful headache, and could smell whisky and feel warm, and
+that for a long time was about all.  Then it noticed that the
+wall opposite was ragged with loosened wall-paper and in
+places stripped of plaster, so that the lathing showed
+through, and that in its own head--no, in the room beyond the
+wall--an impatient stamping noise of iron on wood was
+occurring at intervals.  Then it managed to turn its head, and
+it saw a big, beautiful man sitting on the end of an old
+soapbox and smoking a pipe.  Then it was seized with a
+wrenching sickness, and the big man came quickly and held its
+head and was very good to it, and it felt better and went to
+sleep.  After a while it descended into the Red Sea, with the
+avowed intention of calling Neptune Red Renard to his face,
+and when it got to the bottom, which was of red brick
+sprinkled with white door-knobs that people kept diving for,
+it became frightened and ran and ran until it came to the
+bottom of an iceberg, that had roots like a hyacinth bulb and
+was looking for a place to plant itself, and it climbed up to
+the top of the iceberg, which was all bulrushes, and said, "I
+beg your pardon, but I forgot; I must go back and make my
+apologies."  Then it woke up and spoke in a weak voice.
+
+"Peter Manners," said Aladdin, "come here."
+
+Manners came and sat on the floor beside him.
+
+"Feel better now?" he said.
+
+"Tell me--"said Aladdin.
+
+"Oh, stuff!" said Manners.
+
+"Manners," said Aladdin, "you don't look as if you hated me
+any more."
+
+"You sleep," said Manners.  "That's what you need."
+
+Aladdin thought for a long time and tried to remember what he
+wanted to say, and shutting his eyes, to think better, fell
+asleep.
+
+For the third time he awoke.  Manners was back on the
+soap-box, still as a sphinx, and smoking his pipe.
+
+"Please come and talk some more," said Aladdin.
+
+Again Manners came.
+
+"Tell me about it," said Aladdin.
+
+"You be good and go to sleep," said Manners.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Nearly morning."
+
+"Still storming?"
+
+"No; stars out and warmer."
+
+Aladdin thought a moment.
+
+"Manners," he said, "please talk to me.  How did you find me?"
+
+"Simply enough," said Manners.  "I took the senator's cutter
+out for a little drive, and got lost.  Then I heard somebody
+laughing, and I stumbled over you and your horse; that's all.
+How the devil did you manage to lose your saddle and bridle?"
+
+"It was a dead horse," said Aladdin, and he shivered at the
+recollection.
+
+"Quite so," said Manners.
+
+"It was the funniest thing," said Aladdin, and again he
+shuddered with a kind of reminiscent revolt.  "I pushed it,
+and it fell over frozen to death."  He was conscious of
+talking nonsense.
+
+"Wait a minute, Manners," he said.  "I'll be sensible in a
+minute."
+
+Presently he told Manners about the horse.
+
+"I saw alight just then," he said, "and I thought it was an
+angel."
+
+"It was I," said Manners, naively.
+
+"Yes, Manners, it was you," said Aladdin.
+
+He thought about an angel turning out to be Manners for a long
+time.  Then a terrible recollection came to him, and, in a
+voice shaking with remorse and self-incrimination, he cried:
+
+"God help me, Manners, I would have let you freeze."
+
+Manners pulled at his pipe.
+
+"Manners," said Aladdin, "it's true I know it's true, because,
+for all I knew, I was dying when I said it."
+
+Manners shook his head.
+
+"Oh, no," said Manners.
+
+"Make me think that," said Aladdin, with a quaver.  "Please
+make me think that if you can, for, God help me, I think I
+would have let you freeze."
+
+"When I found you," said Manners, "I--I was sorry that the
+Lord hadn't sent somebody else to you, and me to somebody
+else.  That was because you always hated me with no very good
+reason, and a man hates to be hated, and so, to be quite
+honest, I hated you back."
+
+"Right," said Aladdin, "right."
+
+Light began to come in through the windows, whose broken panes
+Manners had stopped with crumpled wall-paper.
+
+"But when I got you here," said Manners, "and began to work
+over you, you stopped being Aladdin O'Brien, and were just a
+man in trouble."
+
+"Yes," said Aladdin, "it must be like that.  It's got to be
+like that."
+
+"At first," said Manners, "I worked because it seemed the
+proper thing to do, and then I got interested, and then it
+became terrible to think that you might die."
+
+"Yes," said Aladdin.  His face was ghastly in the pre-sunrise
+light.
+
+"You wouldn't get warm for hours," said Manners, "and I got so
+tired that I couldn't rub any more, and so I stripped and got
+into the blankets with you, and tried to keep you as warm as I
+could that way."
+
+He paused to relight his pipe.
+
+Aladdin stared up at the tattered ceiling with wide, wondering
+eyes.
+
+"When you got warm," said Manners, "I gave you all the rest of
+the whisky, and I'm sorry it made you sick, and now you're as
+fit as a fiddle."
+
+"Fit-as-a-fiddle," said Aladdin, slowly, as the wonder grew.
+And then he began to cry like a little child.  Manners waited
+till he had done, and then wiped his face for him.
+
+"So you see," said Manners, simply, though with difficulty,
+--for he was a man shy, to terror, of discussing his own
+feelings,--"I can't help liking you now, and--and I hope you
+won't feel so hard toward me any more."
+
+"I feel hard toward you!" said Aladdin.  "Oh, Manners!" he
+cried.  "I thought all along that you were just a man that
+knew about horses and dogs, but I see, I see; and I'm not
+going to worship anybody any more except you and God, I'm
+not!"
+
+Then he had another great long, hot cry.  Manners waited
+patiently till it was over.
+
+"Manners," said Aladdin, in a choky, hoarse voice, "I think
+you're different from what you used to be.  You look as if--as
+if you 'd got the love of mankind in you."
+
+Manners did not answer.  He appeared to be thinking of
+something wonderful.
+
+"Do you think that's it?" cried Aladdin.
+
+Manners did not answer.
+
+"Can't I get it, too?" Aladdin cried.  "Have I got to be
+little and mean always?  So help me, Manners, I don't love any
+one but you and her."
+
+"You 're not fit to talk," said Manners, with great
+gentleness.  "You go to sleep."  He arose, and going to the
+door of the house, opened it a little way and looked out.
+
+"It's warm as toast out, Aladdin," he called.  "There's going
+to be a big thaw."  He closed the door and went into the next
+room, and Aladdin could hear him talking to the horse.  After
+a little he came back.
+
+"Greener says that she never was better stalled," he said.
+
+"Manners," said Aladdin, "have I been raving?"
+
+"Not been riding quite straight," said Manners.
+
+"How soon are we going to start?" said Aladdin.
+
+"We've got to wait till the snow's pretty well melted," said
+Manners.  "About noon, I think."
+
+Then, because he was very tired and sick and weak, and perhaps
+a trifle delirious, Aladdin asked Manners if he would mind
+holding his hand.  Manners took the hand in his, and a thrill
+ran up Aladdin's arm and all over him, till it settled
+deliciously about his heart, and he slept.
+
+The sun rose, and dazzling beams of light filled the room.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+
+
+"In this combat no man can imagine, unless he had seen and
+heard as I did, what yelling and hideous roaring Apollyon made
+all the time of the fight, he spake like a Dragon; and on the
+other side, what sighs and groans burst from Christian's
+heart.  I never saw him all the while give so much as one
+pleasant look, till he perceived he had wounded Apollyon with
+his two-edged sword: then indeed he did smile and look
+upward."
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Senator St. John, attended by Margaret, her maid, and a
+physician, had made the arduous journey from Washington to
+Portland without too much fatigue, and it seemed reasonable to
+suppose that a long rest in his comfortable house, far from
+the turmoil of public affairs, would do much to reinstate his
+body after the savage attack of gout with complications to
+which it had been subjected during six long weeks.  Arrived at
+Portland, he was driven to the house of his old friend Mr.
+Blankinship, and helped to bed.  Next morning he was seized
+with acute pains in the region of the heart, and though his
+valiant mind refused for a single moment to tolerate the
+thought that the end might be near, was persuaded to send for
+his daughter and his sons.
+
+Margaret was in the parlor with Aladdin.  It was April, and
+the whole land dripped.  Through the open window, for the day
+was warm, the moisture of the soaked ground and trees was
+almost audible.  Margaret had much to say to Aladdin, and he
+to her; they had not met for several months.
+
+"I want to hear about Peter," said Aladdin--"all about him.
+He met you, of course, and got you across the city?"
+
+"Yes, and his father came, too," said Margaret.  "Such an
+old dear--you never saw him, did you?  He's taller than
+Peter, but much thinner, and a great aristocrat.  He's the
+only man I ever saw that has more presence than papa.  He
+looks like a fine old bird, and you can see his skull very
+plainly--especially when he laughs, if you know what I
+mean.  And he's really witty.  He knows all about you and
+wants you to go and stay with them sometime."  Aladdin
+sighed for the pure delight of hearing Margaret's voice
+running on and on.  He was busy looking at her, and did not
+pay the slightest attention to what she said.  "And the
+girl came to lunch, Aladdin, and she is so pretty, but not
+a bit serene like Peter, and the men are all wild about
+her, but she doesn't care that--"
+
+"Doesn't she?" said Aladdin, annoyingly.
+
+"No, she doesn't!" said Margaret, tartly.  "She says she's
+going to be a horse-breaker or a nurse, and all the while she
+kept making eyes at brother John, and he lost his poise
+entirely and smirked and blushed, and I shouldn't wonder a bit
+if he'd made up his mind to marry her, and if he has he will--"
+
+Aladdin caught at the gist of the last sentence.  "Is that all
+that's necessary?" he said.  "Has a man only got to make up
+his mind to marry a certain girl?"
+
+"It's all brother John would have to do," said Margaret,
+provokingly.
+
+"Admitting that," said Aladdin, "how about the other men?"
+
+"Why," said Margaret, "I suppose that if a man really and
+truly makes up his mind to get the girl he wants, he'll get
+her."
+
+She looked at him with a grand innocence.  Aladdin's heart
+leaped a little.
+
+"But suppose two men made up their minds," said Aladdin, "to
+get the same girl."
+
+"That would just prove the rule," said Margaret, refusing to
+see any personal application, "because one of them would get
+her, and the other would be the exception."
+
+"Would the one who spoke first have an advantage?" said
+Aladdin.  "Suppose he'd wanted her ever so long, and had tried
+to succeed because of her, and"--he was warming to the
+subject, which meant much to him--"had never known that there
+was any other girl in the world, and had pinned all his faith
+and hope on her, would he have any advantage?"
+
+"I don't know," said Margaret, rather dreamily.
+
+"Because if he would--" Aladdin reached forward and took one
+of her hands in his two.
+
+She let it lie there, and for a moment they looked into each
+other's eyes.  Margaret withdrew her hand.
+
+"I know--I know," she said.  "But you mustn't say it, 'Laddin
+dear, because--somehow I feel that there are heaps of things
+to be considered before either of us ought to think of that.
+And how can we be quite sure?  Anyway, if it's going to
+happen--it will happen.  And that's all I'm going to say,
+'Laddin."
+
+"Tell me," he said gently, "what the trouble is, dear.  Is it
+this: do you think you care for me, and aren't sure?  Is that
+it?"
+
+She nodded gravely.  Aladdin took a long breath.
+
+"Well," he said finally, "I believe I love you well enough,
+Margaret, to hope that you get the man who will make you
+happiest. I don't know," he went on rather gloomily, "that I'm
+exactly calculated to make anybody happy, but," he concluded,
+with a quavering smile, "I'd like to try." They shook hands
+like the two very old friends they were.
+
+"We'll always be that, anyway," said Margaret.
+
+"Always," said Aladdin.
+
+"Mademoiselle!" Eugenie opened the parlor door and looked
+cautiously in, after the manner of the French domestic.
+
+"What is it?" said Margaret in French.
+
+Aladdin listened with intense admiration, for he did not
+understand a word.
+
+"Monsieur does not carry himself so well," said Eugenie, "and
+he asks if mademoiselle will have the goodness to mount a
+moment to his room."
+
+"I'll go at once." Margaret rose.  "Papa's worse," she said to
+Aladdin.  "Will you wait?"
+
+"I am so sorry," said Aladdin.  "No, I can't wait; I have to
+get out the paper.  I"--he smiled--"am announcing to an eager
+public what general, in my expert opinion, is best fitted to
+command the armies of the United States."
+
+"Of course there'll be fighting."
+
+"Of course - and in a day or two.  Good-by."
+
+"Good-by."
+
+"I'll come round later and inquire about your father.  Give
+him my love."
+
+Margaret ran up-stairs to her father's room.  He was in great
+pain, but perfectly calm and collected.  As Margaret entered,
+the doctor went out, and she was alone with her father.
+
+"Are you feeling badly, dear?" she said.
+
+"I am feeling more easy than a moment ago," said the senator.
+"Bring a chair over here, Peggy; we must have a little talk."
+
+She brought a little upright chair and sat down facing him,
+her right hand nestling over one of his.
+
+"The doctor," said the senator, "considers that my condition
+is critical."
+
+"Papa"
+
+"I disagree with him.  I shall, I believe, live to see the end
+of this civil riot, but I cannot be sure.  So it behooves me
+to ask my dear daughter a question."  St. John asked it with
+eagerness.  "Which is it to be, Peggy?"
+
+She blushed deeply.
+
+"You are interested in Aladdin O'Brien?"
+
+Her head drooped a little.
+
+"Yes, papa."
+
+The senator sighed.
+
+"Thank you, dear," he said.  "That is all I wanted to know.  I
+had hoped that it would be otherwise.  Peggy," he said, "I
+love that other young man like a son."
+
+"Peter?"
+
+"I have always hoped that you would see him as I have seen
+him.  I would be happy if I thought that I could leave you in
+such strong young hands.  I trust him absolutely."
+
+"Papa."
+
+"Well, dear?"
+
+"You don't like Aladdin?"
+
+"He is not steady, Margaret."  The simple word was pregnant
+with meaning as it fell from the senator.
+
+"You don't mean that he--that he's like--"
+
+"Yes, dear; I should not wish my youngest son to marry."
+
+"Poor boy," said Margaret, softly.
+
+"It's the Irish in him," said the senator.  "He must do all
+things to extremes.  There, in a word, lies all his strength
+and all his weakness."
+
+"You would be sorry if I married Aladdin?"
+
+"I should be afraid for your happiness.  Do you love him?"
+
+"I am not sure, papa."
+
+"You are fond of Peter, aren't you?"
+
+She leaned forward till her cheek touched his.
+
+"Next to you and 'Laddin."
+
+The senator patted her shoulder, and thus they remained for
+some time.
+
+A great shouting arose in the neighborhood.
+
+The senator sat bolt upright in bed.  His nostrils began to
+quiver.  He was like an old war-horse that hears bugles.
+
+"Sumter?" he cried.  "Sumter?  Do I hear Sumter?"
+
+The shouting became louder.
+
+"Sumter?" he cried.  "Have they fired upon Sumter?"
+
+Margaret flew to the window and threw it open.  It acted upon
+the shouting like the big swell of an organ, and the cries of
+excitement filled the room to bursting.  South Carolina had
+clenched her hand and struck the flag in the face.
+
+The doctor rushed in.  He paused flabbergasted at sight of the
+man whom he had supposed to be dying.
+
+"Great God, man!" cried the senator, "can't you get my
+clothes?"
+
+When he was dressed they brought him his whalebone stick.
+
+"Damn it, I can walk!" said he, and he broke the faithful old
+thing over a knee that had not been bent for a month.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+New fervor of enlistment took place, and among the first to
+enlist was Aladdin, and when his regiment met for organization
+he was unanimously elected major.  He had many friends.
+
+At first he thought that his duty did not lie where his heart
+lay, because of his brother Jack, now fourteen, whom he had to
+support.  And then, the old promises coming to mind, he
+presented himself one morning before Senator St. John.
+
+"Senator," he said, "you promised to do me a favor if I should
+ever ask it."
+
+The senator thought of Margaret and trembled.
+
+"I have come to ask it."
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+"I want to enlist, sir, but if I do there's nobody to look
+after Jack."
+
+Again the senator thought of Margaret, and his heart warmed.
+
+"He shall live in my house, sir," said the senator, "as a
+member of my family, sir."
+
+"God bless you, sir!" cried Aladdin.
+
+In a state of dancing glee he darted off to the "Spy" office
+to see his chief.
+
+Mr. Blankinship was leaning against the post of the street
+door, reading his own editorial in the morning issue.
+
+"Hallo, Mr. Blankinship!" cried Aladdin.
+
+"Hallo, Aladdin!" cried Mr. Blankinship, grinning at his
+favorite.  "Late as usual."
+
+"And for the last time, sir."
+
+"I know of only one good reason for such a statement."
+
+"It's it, sir!"
+
+Mr. Blankinship folded his paper carefully.  His eyes were
+red, for he had been up late the night before.
+
+"I'd go, too," he said simply, "if it wasn't for the mother."
+
+
+The firm of John St. John & Brothers sat in its office.  The
+head of the firm was gorgeous in a new uniform; he had hurried
+up from New York (where he had been paying vigorous court to
+Ellen Manners, whom he had made up his mind to marry) in
+order, as oldest, biggest, and strongest, to enlist for the
+family in one of the home regiments.  There lingered on his
+lips the thrill of a kiss half stolen, half yielded, while in
+his pockets were a number of telegrams since received, and the
+usually grave and stern young man was jocular and bantering.
+The two younger members of the firm were correspondingly
+savage.
+
+"For God's sake, clear out of here," said Hamilton.  "Your
+shingle's down.  Bul and I are running this office now."
+
+"Well, it's the chance of your lives, boys," said the frisky
+colonel.  "I'll have forgotten the law by the time I come
+back."
+
+"Hope you may choke, John," said Hannibal, sweetly.
+
+"Don't allow smoking in here, do you, boys?"  He got no
+answer.  It was a hard-and-fast rule which he himself had
+instituted.
+
+"Well, here goes."  He lighted a huge cigar and puffed it
+insolently about the office.  He surveyed himself in the
+cracked mirror.
+
+"Cursed if a uniform isn't becoming to a man!" he said.
+
+"Chicken!" said Hamilton.
+
+"Puppy!" said Hannibal.
+
+"Titmouse!" said Hamilton.
+
+"Ant!" said Hannibal.
+
+John's grin widened.
+
+"Boys," he said, "you've got one swell looker in the family,
+anyway, and you ought to be glad of that."
+
+The boys exchanged glances.
+
+Hannibal had upon his desk a pen-wiper which consisted of a
+small sponge heavy with the ink of wiped pens.  Hamilton had
+beneath his desk an odd rubber boot which served him as a
+scrap-basket.  These ornamental missiles took John St. John in
+the back of the head at about the same moment, the weight and
+impetus of the boot knocking the cigar clean out of his mouth,
+so that it dashed itself against the mirror.
+
+The gallant colonel turned, still grinning.  "Which threw the
+boot?" said he.
+
+"I did," said Hamilton.
+
+"Then you get the first licking."
+
+Hamilton met his brother's hostile if grinning advance with
+the hardest blow that he could strike him over the left eye.
+Then they clenched, and Hannibal joined the fray.  The three
+brothers, roaring with laughter, proceeded to inflict as much
+damage to each other and the office as they jointly could.
+Over and under they squirmed and contorted, hitting, tripping,
+falling and rising.  Desks went over, lawbooks strewed the
+floor, ink ran, and finally the bust of George Washington,
+which had stood over the inner door since the foundation of
+the firm, came down with a crash.
+
+By this time the three brothers were helpless with laughter.
+The combat ceased, and they sat upon the floor to survey the
+damage.
+
+"You can't handle the old man yet, boys," said the colonel.
+His left eye was closed, and his new uniform looked like the
+ribbons hung on a May-pole.
+
+Hamilton was bleeding at the nose.  Hannibal's lip was split.
+The three looked at each other and shook with laughter.
+
+"I'm inclined to think we've had a healthy bringing-up," said
+Hamilton between gasps.
+
+"Better move, colonel," said Hannibal; "you're sitting in a
+pool of ink."
+
+"So I am," said the colonel, as the cold struck through his
+new trousers.
+
+The laughter broke out afresh.
+
+Beau Larch, in the uniform of a private, appeared at the door.
+
+"Hallo, Beau!"
+
+"Come in."
+
+"Take a hand?"
+
+"Thank you, no," said Beau.  "I just dropped in to tell you
+fellows that we've just had a hell of a licking at Bull Run."
+
+"Us!" said the colonel, rising.
+
+"Us!" said Hamilton.  "Licked!"
+
+"Us!" said Hannibal.
+
+"And I've got other news, too," said Beau, bashfully.  "If I
+stop drinking till my year's up, and don't ever drink any
+more, Claire says she'll marry me."
+
+Hannibal was the first to shake his hand.
+
+"Boys," said Beau, "I hope if any of you ever sees me touch a
+drop you'll strike me dead."
+
+He went out.
+
+"I'm going to find out about this," said John; "what did he
+say the name of the licking was?"
+
+"Bull Run."
+
+"Bull Run.  And I'll come back and tell you."
+
+He was starting to descend the steep stairs to the street,
+when he caught the sound of snickers and creeping footsteps
+behind him.  He turned like a panther, but was not in time.
+The heavily driven toes of the right boots of the younger St.
+Johns lifted him clear of the stairs, and clean to the bottom
+of them.  There he sat, his uniform a thing of the past, his
+left eye blackening and closed, and roars of laughter shaking
+him.
+
+But Hamilton and Hannibal put the office more or less to
+rights, and sat down gloomily at their respective desks.  Up
+till now they had faced being left behind, but this licking
+was too much.  Each brooded over it, while pretending to be up
+to the ears in work.  Hamilton wrote a letter, sealed it,
+addressed it, and presently rose.
+
+"Bul," he said, and to Hannibal the whole manoeuver smacked
+suspicious, "I'm going to run up and see the old man for a few
+minutes."
+
+"All right," said Hannibal.
+
+Hamilton reached the door and turned.
+
+"By the way," he said, "I left a letter on my desk; wish you'd
+put a stamp on it and mail it."
+
+He went out.
+
+Hannibal felt very lonely and fidgety.
+
+"I think I'll just mail that letter and get it off my mind,"
+he said.
+
+He put on his hat, licked a stamp, and crossed to his
+brother's desk.  The letter was there, right enough, but it
+did not require a stamp, for on it was written but one word,
+and that word was Hannibal.
+
+Hannibal tore open the envelop and read:
+
+DEAR OLD Bul :I can't stand it any longer, but you'll try and
+not be mad with me for running off and leaving you to keep up
+the old place alone, and damn it, Bul, two of us ought to go
+anyway .  .  .  .
+
+The letter ran on for a little in the same strain.  Hannibal
+put the letter in his pocket, and sat down at his brother's
+desk.
+
+"It will kill the old man if we all go," he said.  "And of all
+three I'm the one with the best rights to go and get shot."
+
+He took from somewhere in his clothes a little gold locket,
+flat and plain.  Each of the St. John boys had carried one
+since their mother's death.  Facing her picture each had had
+engraved the motto which he had chosen for himself to be his
+watchword in life.  In John's locket was engraved, "In fortis
+vinces"; in Hamilton's, "Deo volente"; and in Hannibal's,
+"Carpe diem."  But in Hannibal's locket there was another
+picture besides that of his mother.  He opened the locket with
+his thumb-nails and laid it on the desk before him.  Presently
+his eyes dimmed, and he looked beyond the locket.
+
+Hamilton St. John's ink-well was a globe of glass, with a hole
+like a thimble in the top to contain ink.  Hannibal found
+himself looking at this, and noting the perfect miniature
+reproduction of the big calendar on the wall, as it was
+refracted by the glass.  With his thoughts far away, his eyes
+continued to look at the neat little curly calendar in the
+ink-well.  Presently it seemed to him that it was not a
+calendar at all, but just a patch of bright green color--a
+patch of bright green that became grass, an acre of it, a
+ten-acre field, a great field gay with trampled flowers,
+rolling hills, woods, meadows, fences, streams.  Then he
+saw, lying thickly over a fair region, broken guns, exploded
+cannons, torn flags, horses and men contorted and sprung in
+death; everywhere death and demolition.  He wandered over
+the field and came presently upon himself, scorched, mangled,
+and dead under the wheel of a cannon.
+
+After a little it seemed to him that the field of battle
+shrank until it became again the calendar.  But there was
+something odd about that calendar; the dates were queer.  It
+read July, right enough; but this was the year 1861, whereas
+the calendar bore the date 1863.  And why was there a cross to
+mark the third day of July?  Hannibal came to with a shock;
+but he could have sworn that he had not been asleep.
+
+"God is very--very good!" he said solemnly.
+
+Then he opened his pen-knife, and scratched a deep line of
+erasure through the "Carpe diem" in his locket, and
+underneath, cutting with great pains, he inserted a date,
+"July 3, 1863," and the words "Nunc dimittis."  Below that he
+cut "Te Deum laudamus."
+
+He looked once more at the picture of his mother and at the
+picture that was not of his mother, shut the little gold case,
+and put it back in his pocket.
+
+Then he inked on the white inside of a paper-box cover, in
+large letters, these words:
+
+This office will not be opened until the end of the war.
+
+That office was never opened again.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+The lives of sixty million people had become suddenly full of
+drill, organization, uniforms, military music, flags, hatred,
+love, and self-sacrifice, and the nations of the Old World
+stood about, note-book in hand, like so many medical students
+at a clinic: could a heart, cut in two, continue to supply a
+body with blood after the soul had been withdrawn?  And the
+nations of the Old World hoped that there would be enough
+fresh meat left on the carcass for them to feed on, when the
+experiment should be at an end.  Mother England was
+particularly hungry, and dearly hoped to have the sucking of
+the eggs which she herself had laid.
+
+It was a great time for young men, and Margaret shed secret
+tears on behalf of five of them.  It had fallen upon her to
+tell the old man that his three sons had enlisted, and that
+task had tortured her for an hour before she had dared go and
+accomplish it.
+
+"Papa," she said, "Ham has enlisted, and so has Bul."
+
+The senator had not moved a muscle.
+
+"It was only a question of time," he said.  "I wish that I had
+begotten a dozen others."
+
+He had borrowed her well-marked Bible from old Mrs.
+Blankinship and read Isaiah at a gulp.  Then he had sought out
+his boys and bantered them on their new clothes.
+
+Margaret sat very still for a long time after the interview
+with her father.  She knew that Bul, whom she loved best of
+her brothers, was going to be killed.  She had never before
+seen his face so serenely happy as when he came to tell her
+that he had sworn in, nor had she ever before seen that
+unexplainable phenomenon, known variously as fate, doom,
+numbered, Nemesis, written upon a face.  And there were others
+who might be taken.
+
+Aladdin came in for a moment to give her the news.  He was
+nervous with enthusiasm, and had been working like a horse.
+His regiment was to leave Friday for the front; he could stay
+but a minute; he had only dashed in on his way to drill.
+Would she care to come?  Quite right; there was nothing much
+to look at.  He talked as cheerfully and as rapidly as a
+mountain brook runs.  And then he gave his best piece of news,
+and looked almost handsome as he gave it.
+
+"Peter's here," he said.  "He's outside talking to the
+senator.  He looks simply stunning, and he's a whole lot of
+things on a staff--assistant adjutant-general with the rank of
+a colonel; and he's floated up here on a dash against time to
+say good-by to us."
+
+Aladdin's face puckered.
+
+"You and Peter and I, Margaret," he said, "Lord, what a
+muddle!"
+
+"I'm terribly blue, old man," said Margaret, "and it hurts to
+have you say things like that."
+
+Instantly Aladdin was all concern.
+
+"You know I wouldn't hurt you purposely," he said, "but I'm
+terribly blue, too, dear, and one tries to keep up and says
+asinine things, and"--he smiled, and his smile was very
+winning--"is at once forgiven by an old dear."
+
+She held out her hand and gave his a friendly squeeze.
+
+"You old darling!" he said, and ran out.
+
+She followed him into the hall, and met Manners, who had just
+parted from the senator at the front door.  His uniform was
+wonderfully becoming.
+
+"Is it Peter?"
+
+They shook hands.
+
+"Never," she said, "have I seen anything so beautiful!"
+
+Peter blushed (looking even more beautiful, for he hated to be
+talked about).
+
+"Where was 'Laddin going?" he said.  "He went by me like a
+shot out of a gun, and had only time to pull my hat over my
+eyes and squeal Peeeter."
+
+"He's very important now," said Margaret, "and wonders how
+anybody can want to write things and be a poet or a musician
+when there are real things to do in the world."
+
+Peter looked at his watch.
+
+"Isn't that the least bit rude?" said Margaret.
+
+"No," said Peter; "my train back leaves in one hour, and I
+could better afford to lose my chances of heaven.  I had no
+business to come, as it was.  But I had to come."
+
+Margaret sighed.  She had hoped that it would not happen so
+soon.  He followed her into the parlor and closed the door
+behind him.
+
+"First, Margaret," he said, "I'm going to tell you something
+that may surprise you a little.  It did me; it was so sudden.
+My sister Ellen is going to be married."
+
+"Ellen!" exclaimed Margaret.  "Why, she always said--"
+"It's only been arranged in the last few days," said Peter,
+"by many telegrams.  I was told to tell you."
+
+"Is he nice?"
+
+"Yes.  He's a good chap."
+
+"Rich?"
+
+"Well--rather rising than rich."
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"Your brother John."
+
+"My dear Peter--"
+
+"No--I never did, either!"
+
+"Isn't that splendid!"
+
+Peter pulled a grave face.
+
+"Yes--and no," he said.
+
+"I hope you're not going to be insolent," said Margaret.
+
+"It depends on what you call insolent.  My father, you see,
+objects very much to having Ellen go out of the family, but he
+says that he can learn to bear that if the only other girl in
+the world will come into the family."
+
+Manners' voice had become husky toward the last of the
+sentence, and perhaps not husky so much as hungry.  Margaret
+knew better than to say anything of the kind, but she couldn't
+help looking as innocent as a child and saying:
+
+"Won't she?"
+
+"How do I know?" said Peter.  "I have come to ask her."
+
+He looked so very strong and manly and frank that Margaret,
+whose world had been terribly blue recently, was half tempted
+to throw herself into his arms and cry.
+
+"O Peter!" she said pitifully.
+
+He came and sat beside her on the sofa, and drew her close to
+him.
+
+"My darling," he said brokenly.
+
+A great sense of trust and security stole over Margaret, but
+she knew that it was not love.  Yet for a moment she
+hesitated, for she knew that if she took this man, his arm
+would always be about her, and he would always--always--always
+be good to her.  As she sat there, not trusting herself to
+speak, she had her first doubt of Aladdin, and she wondered if
+he loved her as much--as much as he loved Aladdin.  Then she
+felt like a traitor.
+
+For a little neither could find any words to say.  So still
+they sat that Margaret could hear the muffled ticking of
+Peter's watch.  At length Peter spoke.
+
+"What shall I tell my father?" he said.
+
+"Tell him--" said Margaret, and her voice broke.
+
+"Aren't you sure, darling--is that it?"
+
+She nodded with tears in her eyes.
+
+He took his arm from round her waist, and she felt very
+lonely.
+
+"But I'm always going to love you," he said.
+
+She felt still more alone.
+
+"Peter," she said, "I can't explain things very well, but I
+--I--don't want you to go away feeling as if--"
+
+Manners' eyes lifted up.
+
+"As if it was all over?" he asked eagerly.
+
+"Almost that, Peter," she said.  "I--I can't say yes now--but
+God knows, Peter, perhaps sometime--I--I can."
+
+She was thinking of the flighty and moody Aladdin, who had
+loved her so long, and whom (she suddenly realized in spite
+of the words just spoken) she loved back with all her heart
+and soul.
+
+Honor rose hot in her to give Peter a final answer now and
+forever--no.  But she looked into his eyes and could not.
+He looked at his watch.
+
+"Margaret dear," he said, "I've got to go.  Thanks for
+everything, and for the hope and all, and--and I may never
+see you again, but if I do, will you give me my answer then?"
+
+"I will," said Margaret, "when I see you again."
+
+They rose.
+
+"May I kiss you, Margaret?" he said.
+
+"Certainly, Peter."
+
+He kissed her on the cheek, and went away with her tears on
+his lips.
+
+A newly organized fife-and-drum corps marched by struggling
+with "The Girl I Left Behind Me."
+
+In those days the most strangled rendering of that tune would
+bring lumps into the throats of those that heard.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Hannible and Hamilton were privates in the nth regiment,
+Aladdin was major, and John was colonel.  If any of them
+had the slightest military knowledge, it was Aladdin.  Not
+in vain had he mastered the encyclopedia from Safety-lamps
+to Stranglers.  He could explain with strange words and in
+long, balanced sentences everything about the British
+army that began with an S, except only those things whose
+second letter stood farther down in the alphabet than
+T.  But the elements of knowledge kept dropping in, at
+first on perfunctory calls, visitors that disappeared
+when you turned to speak with them, but that later came
+to stay.  The four young men were like children with a
+"roll-the-seven-number-eight-shot-into-the-middle" puzzle.
+They could make a great rattling with the shot, and
+control their tempers; that was about all.  Later they
+were to form units in the most efficient and intelligent
+large body of men that the world ever saw, with the possible
+exception of the armies it was to be pitted against; but
+those, it must be owned, were usually smaller, though, in the
+ability of their commanders to form concentration, often of
+three times the size.  They learned that it is cheaper to let
+a company sleep in tents upon hard ground of a rainy night
+than to lodge them in a neighboring hotel at one's own
+expense, and that going the rounds in pitch-darkness grows
+less thrilling in exact ratio to the number of times you do
+it, and finally, even in sight of the enemy's lines, becomes
+as boring as waltzing with a girl you don't like.  They began
+to learn that cleanliness is next to godliness only in times
+of peace, and that food is the one god, and the stomach his
+only prophet.  They learned that the most difficult of all
+duties is to keep the face straight when the horse of a
+brother officer who mounts for the first time is surprised to
+vehemence by its first experience with a brass band.
+
+Aladdin was absolutely equal to the occasion, and developed
+an astonishing talent for play-acting, and, it is to be
+feared, strutted a little, both in the bosom of his soul and
+on the parade-ground.  It was only when he looked at two of
+the "tall men on the right," Hamilton and Hannibal St. John,
+who had chosen humble parts that they might serve under their
+brother, that he felt properly small and resented himself.
+Sometimes, too, he searched his past life and could find in
+it only one brave deed, his swim down the river, and he
+wondered with an awful wonder what he would do when the
+firing began.  He need not have troubled: he was of too
+curious and inquiring a disposition to be afraid of most
+things.  And he was yet to see proved on many Southern fields
+that a coward is, if anything, a rarer bird than a white
+quail.  Only once in action did Aladdin see a man really show
+the white feather.  The man had gone into the army from a
+grocery-store, and was a very thin, small specimen with a
+very big, bulbous head; and, like many others of his class,
+proved to be a perfect fire-eater in battle, and a regular
+buzzard to escape fever and find food.  But during the famous
+seven days before Richmond a retreat was ordered of a part of
+the line which the Buzzard helped compose, and he was
+confronted by the necessity, for his friends were hastening
+him from behind, of crossing a gully by means of a somewhat
+slender fallen tree.  It was then that Aladdin saw him show
+fear.  Bullets tore up the bark of the tree, and pine
+needles, clipped from the trees overhead, fell in showers.
+But he did not mind that.  It was the slenderness and
+instability of the fallen tree that froze the marrow in his
+bones: would it bear his one hundred and twenty-four pounds,
+or would it precipitate him, an awful drop of ten feet, into
+the softest of muds at the bottom of the gully, where a
+sickeningly striped but in reality harmless water-snake lay
+coiled?
+
+Finally, pale and shaking, he ventured on the log, got
+half-way across, turned giddy, and fell with such a howl
+of terror that it was only equaled in vehemence by the
+efforts of the snake to get out of the way.  After which
+the Buzzard picked himself up, scrambled out, and
+continued his retreat, scraping his muddied boots among
+the fallen leaves as he went.  "Some talk of Alexander
+and some of Hercules," but it may be that an exceedingly
+giddy elevation coupled with a serpent would have made
+shivering children of both those heroes.  To each his
+own fear.  Margaret's and Aladdin's was the same they
+both feared Aladdin.
+
+That afternoon the regiment was to leave for the front, and
+Aladdin went to bid Margaret good-by.  She and her father
+were still staying with the Blankinships.
+
+They had a very satisfactory talk, beginning with the
+beginning of things, and going over their long friendship,
+laughing, remembering, and regretting.  Jack was to live with
+the St. Johns, and they talked much of him, and of old Mrs.
+Brackett, and of affairs at home.  Jack about this time was
+in the seventh hell of despair, for his extreme youth had
+prevented him from bringing to its triumphant conclusion a
+pleasant little surprise, consisting of a blue uniform, which
+he had planned for himself and others.  No love of country
+stirred the bosom of the guileless Jack; only hatred of
+certain books out of which he was obliged to learn many
+useless things, such as reading, writing, spelling, and
+arithmetic.  Besides, word had come to him that persimmons
+were to be had for the picking and chickens for the
+broiling in that country toward which the troops were
+heading.  And much also had he heard concerning the beauty
+of Southern maidens, and of the striped watermelons in
+the watermelon-patch.  And so he was to be left behind,
+and God was not good.
+
+Toward the end their talk got very serious.
+
+"I'm going to turn over a new leaf," said Aladdin, "and be
+better things, Margaret, and you must save up a lot of pride
+to have in me if I do, and perhaps it will all come right in
+the end."
+
+"You know how fond I am of you," said Margaret, "and because
+I am, and because you're all the big things that are hard to
+be, I want you to be all the little things that ought to be
+so easy to be.  That doesn't seem very plain, but I mean--"
+
+"I know exactly what you mean," said Aladdin.  "Don't you
+suppose I know myself pretty well by this time, and how far
+I've got to climb before I have a ghost of a right to tell
+you what I tell you every time I look at you?"
+
+Aladdin rose.
+
+"Margaret," he said, "this time I'm going like an old friend.
+If I make good and live steady, as I mean to do, I shall come
+back like a lover.  Meanwhile you shall think all things
+over, and if you think that you can care for me, you shall
+tell me so when I come back.  And if you conclude that you
+can't, you shall tell me.  I'm not going to ask you to marry
+me now, because in no way am I in a position to.  But if I
+come back and say to you, 'Margaret, I have turned into a man
+at last,' you will know that I am telling the truth and am in
+a position to ask anything I please.  For I shall come back
+without a cent, but with a character, and that's everything.
+I shall not drink any more, and every night I shall pray to
+God to help me believe in Him.  But, Margaret, I may not come
+back at all.  If I don't it will be for one of two reasons.
+Either I shall fail in becoming worthy to kiss the dust under
+your blessed feet, or I shall be killed.  In the first case,
+I beg that you will pray for me; but in the second I pray
+that you will forget all that was bad in me and only remember
+what was good.  And so, darling--" his voice broke, "because
+I am a little afraid of death and terribly afraid of
+myself--"
+
+She came obediently into his arms, and knew what it was to be
+kissed by the man she loved.
+
+"Aladdin," she said, "promise that nothing except--"
+
+"Death?" said Aladdin.
+
+"--that nothing, nothing except death--shall keep you from
+coming back."
+
+"If I live," said Aladdin, "I will come back."
+
+Everybody of education knows that Lucy Locket lost her pocket
+and that Betty Pringle found it without a penny "in it" (to
+rhyme with "found it "), but everybody does not know that the
+aforementioned Lucy Locket had a tune composed for her
+benefit that has thrilled the hearts of more sons of the
+young republic when stepping to battle than any other tune,
+past, present, or to come.  There is a martial vigor and a
+tear in "The Girl I Left Behind Me"; some feet cannot help
+falling into rhythm when they hear the "British Grenadiers";
+North and South alike are possessed with a do-or-die madness
+when the wild notes of "Dixie" rush from the brass; and "John
+Brown's Body" will cause the dumb to sing.  But it is the
+farcical little quickstep known by the ridiculous name of
+"Yankee Doodle" which the nations would do well to consider
+when straining the patience of the peace-loving and United
+States.
+
+And so they marched down the street to the station, and the
+tall men walked on the right and the little men on the left,
+and the small boys trotted alongside, and the brand-new flags
+flung out, and bouquets were thrown, and there were cheers
+from the heart up all along the line.  But ever the saucy
+fifes sang, and the drums gaily beat
+
+          Yankee Doodle came to town
+            Riding on a pony,
+          Stuck a feather in his Hat,
+            And called it macaroni.
+
+At the station the emotions attendant on departure found but
+one voice.  The mother said to the son what the sweetheart
+said to the lover, and the sister to the brother.  Nor was
+this in any manner different from what the brother, lover,
+and son said to the sister, sweetheart, and mother.  It was
+the last sentence which bleeding hearts supply to lips at
+moments of farewell:
+
+"Write to me."
+
+And the supercilious little quickstep went on:
+
+          Yankee Doodle came to town
+         Riding on a pony,
+          Stuck a feather in his Hat,
+            And called it macaroni.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+A tongue of land with Richmond (built, like another capital
+beginning with R, on many hills) for its major root, and a
+fortification vulgarly supposed to be of the gentler sex for
+its tip, is formed by the yellow flow of the James and York
+rivers.  To land an army upon the tip of this tongue, march
+the length of it and extract the root, after reducing it to a
+reminiscence, was the wise plan of the powers early in the
+year 1862.  To march an army of preponderous strength through
+level and fertile country, flanked by friendly war-ships and
+backed by unassailable credit; to meet and overcome a much
+smaller and far less rich army, intrenched behind earthworks
+of doubtful formidableness, and finally to besiege and
+capture an isolated city of more historic than strategic
+advantages, seemed on the face of it as easy as rolling a
+barrel downhill or eating when hungry.  But the level,
+fertile country was discovered to be very muddy, its supply
+of rain from heaven unparalleled in nature, its streams as
+deadly as arsenic, and its topography utterly different from
+that assigned to it in any known geography.  Furthermore, in
+its woods, and it was nearly all woods, dwelt far more
+mosquitos than there are lost souls in Hades, and each
+mosquito had a hollow spike in his head through which he not
+only could but would squirt, with or without provocation, the
+triple compound essence of malaria into veins brought up on
+oxygen, and on water through which you could see the pebbles
+at the bottom.  A bosom friend of the mosquito, and some say
+his paramour, was little Miss Tick.  Of the two she was
+considerably the more hellish, and forsook her dwelling-places
+in the woods for the warm flesh of soldiers where it is
+rosiest, next the skin.  The body, arms, and legs of Miss
+Tick could be scratched to nothing by poisonous finger-nails,
+but her detached head was eternal, and through eternity she
+bit and gnawed and sometimes laughed in the hollow of her
+black soul.  For the horses, mules, and cattle there were
+shrubs which disagreed with them, and gigantic horse-flies.
+And for the general at the head of the vast body of
+irritation there was an opposing army whose numbers he
+overrated, and whose whereabouts he kept discovering
+suddenly.  It is said that during the Peninsular campaign the
+buzzards were so well nourished that they raised a second
+brood.
+
+While the army was still in the vicinity of Fort Monroe,
+numbers of officers secured leave to ride over to Newport
+News and view the traces of the recent and celebrated naval
+fight, which was to relegate wooden battle-ships to the
+fireplace.  Aladdin was among those to go.  At this time he
+was in great spirits, for it had been brought home to him
+that he was one of the elect, one of those infinitely rare
+and godlike creatures whom mosquitos do not bite nor ticks
+molest.  His nights were as peaceful as the grave, and the
+poisonous drinking-waters glanced from his rubber
+constitution.  Besides, he had forsaken his regimental duties
+to enjoy a life of constant variety upon the staff of a
+general, and had begun to feel at home on horseback.
+It was one of those radiant, smiling days, which later on
+were to become rarer than charity, and the woods were
+positively festive with sunshine.  And the temperature was
+precisely that which brings to a young man's fancy thoughts
+of love.  So that it was in the nature of a shock to come
+suddenly upon the shore and behold for the first time the
+finality of war.  There was no visible glory about it.  What
+had happened to the Cumberland and the Congress was
+disappointingly like what would happen to two ships destroyed
+in shallow water.  The masts of the Cumberland, slightly off
+the vertical and still rigged, projected for half their
+length from the yellow surface of the river.  That was all.
+Some distance to the left and half submerged was a blackened
+and charred mass that bore some resemblance to a ship that
+had once been proud and tall, and known by the name of
+Congress.  That was all.  Aladdin had hoped that war would be
+a little more like the pictures.
+
+As he rode back, pondering, toward the encampment, however,
+he came upon something which was truly an earnest of what was
+to come.  There were so many buzzards perched in the trees of
+a certain wood that he turned in to see what they had.  He
+came upon it suddenly, just beyond a cheerful bush of holly,
+and the buzzards stepped reluctantly back until he had
+looked.  It was only a horse.  Some of the buzzards, heavy
+with food, raised their eyelids heavily and looked at
+Aladdin, and then lapsed back into filthy sleep.  Others, not
+yet satiated, looked upon him querulously, and suggested as
+much as looks can suggest that he go, and trouble them no
+more.  Others, the newly arrived and ravenous, swooped above
+the trees, so that dark circles were drawn over the fallen
+sunlight.  Now a buzzard opened and closed its wings, and now
+one looked from the horse to Aladdin, and back, fretfully, to
+the horse.  There seemed to be hundreds of them, dark and
+dirty, with raw heads and eyelids.  Aladdin sat solemn and
+motionless upon his horse, but he could feel the cold sweat
+of horror running down his sides from under his arms, and the
+bristling of his hair.  He wanted to make a great noise, to
+shout, to do anything, but he did not dare.  It would have
+been breaking the rules.  In that assembly no sound was
+allowed, for the meeting was unholy and wicked and worked
+with hurried stealth, so that the attention of God should not
+be drawn.  Aladdin knew that he had no right to be there,
+that without knocking he had entered the bedroom of horror
+and found her naked in the arms of lust.  He turned and rode
+away shivering and without looking back.  He had not ridden
+the distance between two forest trees before the carcass was
+again black with the descending birds, and the blood streamed
+to their bills.
+
+The Peninsular campaign developed four kinds of men: the
+survivors, the wounded, the dead, and the missing.  When the
+campaign was over Aladdin sometimes woke starting in the
+night to think of those missing and of what he had seen in
+the woods.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+The tedious locomotion of an army and the incessant
+reluctance of the battle to be met will try a sinner; but a
+scarcity of tobacco and constantly wet feet will try a saint.
+Aladdin was somewhat of both.  But in the fidgety gloom which
+presently settled upon man and beast, his, great Irish gift
+of cheerfulness shone like a star.  He even gave up longing
+for promotion, and strained his mind to the cracking-point
+for humorous verses and catching tunes.  He went singing up
+the Peninsula, and thumped the gay banjo by the camp-fire,
+and was greatly beloved by the foot-sore and sick.  He had
+given up worrying about what he would do in battle, for there
+were much more important things to think about.
+
+Battles are to soldiers what Christmas trees are to children:
+you must wait, wait, and wait for them, and forever wait; and
+when they do come the presents are apt to be a little tawdry.
+And you are only envied by the other little children who
+didn't really see what you really got.  The most comforting
+man in the army was one minister of the gospel, and the most
+annoying was another.  The first had the divine gift of
+story-telling and laughter, and the second thanked God
+because the soldiers had run out of their best friend,
+tobacco, which he described through his nose as "filthy
+weed," "vile narcotic," or "pernicious hell-plant."  And they
+both served the Lord as hard as they could--and they both
+suffered from dysentery.
+
+As the days passed and the temperature of the army rose, and
+its digestion became permanently impaired, Aladdin, by giving
+out, and constantly, all that was best in himself, became
+gradually exhausted.  He found himself telling stories as
+many as three times to the same man, and he began to steal
+from the poets and musicians that he knew in order to keep
+abreast of his own original powers of production.  He even
+went so far as to draw inspiration from men of uneven heights
+stood in line: he would hum the intervals as scored by their
+heads on an imaginary staff and fashion his tune accordingly,
+but this tended to a somewhat compressed range and was not
+always happy in its results.  His efforts, however, were
+appreciated, and the emaciated young Irishman became a most
+exceptional prophet, and received honor in his own land.
+
+For the rest, being a staff-officer, he was kept busy and
+rode hundreds of extra miles through the rain.  It was a
+large army, as inexperienced as it was large, and it stood in
+great need of being kept in contact with itself.  If you
+lived at one end of it and wanted to know what was going on
+at the other end, you had to travel about as far as from New
+York to New Haven.  The army proper, marching by fours,
+stretched away through the wet lands for forty miles.  A
+fly-bitten tail of ambulances and wagons, with six miserable
+horses or six perfectly happy mules attached to each, added
+another twenty miles.  At the not always attained rate of
+fifteen miles a day the army could pass a given point in four
+days.  To the gods in Olympus it would have appeared to have
+all the characteristic color and shape of an angleworm,
+without, however, enjoying that reptile's excellent good
+health.  If the armies of Washington, Cornwallis, Clive,
+Pizarro, Cortes, and Christian de Wet had been added to it,
+they would have passed unnoticed in the crowd.  And the
+recurring fear of the general in command of this army was
+that the army he sought would prove to be twice as big.  So
+speculation was active between the York and James rivers.
+
+In the minds of the soldiers a thousand years passed, and
+then there was a little fight, and they learned that they
+were soldiers.  And so did the other army.  Another thousand
+years passed, and it seemed tactful to change bases.
+Accordingly, that which had been arduously established on a
+muddy river called the Chickahominy (and it was very far from
+either of those two good things) was forsaken, and the host
+began to be moved toward the James.  This move would have
+been more smoothly accomplished if the enemy had not
+interfered.  They, however, insisted upon making history,
+turning a change of base into a nominal retreat, and
+begetting in themselves a brass-bound and untamable spirit
+which it took vast wealth and several years to humble.  From
+Gaines's Mill to the awful brow of Malvern Hill there were
+thunder and death.  Forty thousand men were somewhat
+needlessly killed, wounded, or (as one paradoxical account
+has it) "found missing."
+
+Aladdin missed the fight at Malvern Hill and became wounded
+in a non-bellicose fashion.  His general desired to make a
+remark to another general, and writing it on a piece of thin
+yellow paper, gave it to him to deliver.  He rode off to the
+tune of axes,--for a Maine regiment was putting in an hour in
+undoing the stately work of a hundred years,--trotted fifteen
+miles peacefully enough, delivered his general's remark, and
+started back.  Then came night and a sticky mist.  Then the
+impossibility of finding the way.  Aladdin rode on and on,
+courageously if not wisely, and came in time to the dimly
+discernible outbuildings of a Virginia mansion.  They stood
+huddled dark and wet in the mist, which was turning to rain,
+and there was no sign of life in or about them.  Aladdin
+passed them and turned into an alley of great trees.  By
+looking skyward he could keep to the road they bounded.  As
+he drew near the mansion itself a great smell of box and
+roses filled his nostrils with fragrance.  But to him,
+standing under the pillared portico and knocking upon the
+door, came no word of welcome and no stir of lights.  He gave
+it up in disgust, mounted, and rode back through the rich mud
+to the stables.  Had he looked over his shoulder he might
+have seen a face at one of the windows of the house.
+
+He found a door of one of the stables unlocked, and went in,
+leading his horse.  Within there was a smell of hay.  He
+closed the door behind him, unsaddled, and fell to groping
+about in the dark.  He wanted several armfuls of that hay,
+and he couldn't find them.  The hay kept calling to his nose,
+"Here I am, here I am"; but when he got there, it was hiding
+somewhere else.  It was like a game of blindman's-buff.  Then
+he heard the munching of his horse and knew that the sought
+was found.  He moved toward the horse, stepped on a rotten
+planking, and fell through the floor.  Something caught his
+chin violently as he went through, and in a pool of filthy
+water, one leg doubled and broken under him, he passed the
+night as tranquilly as if he had been dosed with laudanum.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+Aladdin came to consciousness in the early morning.  He was
+about as sick as a man can be this side of actual
+dissolution, and the pain in his broken leg was as sharp as a
+scream.  He lay groaning and doubled in the filthy half-inch
+of water into which he had fallen.  About him was darkness,
+but overhead a glimmer of light showed a jagged and cruel
+hole in the planking of the stable floor.  Very slowly, for
+his agony was unspeakable, he came to a realization of what
+had happened.  He called for help, and his voice was thick
+and unresonant, like the voice of a drunken man.  His
+horse heard him and neighed.  Now and again he lapsed into
+semi-unconsciousness, and time passed without track.  Hours
+passed, when suddenly the glimmer above him brightened, and
+he heard light footsteps and the cackling of hens.  He called
+for help.  Instantly there was silence.  It continued a long
+time.  Then he heard a voice like soft music, and the voice
+said, "Who's there?"
+
+A shadow came between him and the light, and a fair face that
+was darkened looked down upon him.
+
+"For God's sake take care," he said.  "Those boards are
+rotten."
+
+"You 're a Yankee, aren't you?" said the voice, sweetly.
+
+"Yes," said Aladdin, "and I'm badly hurt."
+
+The voice laughed.
+
+"Hurt, are you?" it said.
+
+"I think I've broken my leg," said Aladdin.  "Can you get
+some one to help me out of this?"
+
+"Reckon you're all right down there," said the voice.
+
+Aladdin revolved the brutality of it in his mind.
+
+"Do you mean to say that you're not going to help me?" he
+said.
+
+"Help you?  Why should I?"
+
+Aladdin groaned, and could have killed himself for groaning.
+
+"If you don't help me," he said, and his voice broke, for he
+was suffering tortures, "I'll die before long."
+
+A perfectly cool and cruel "Well?" came back to him.
+
+"You won't help me?"
+
+"No."
+
+Anger surged in his heart, but he spoke with measured
+sarcasm.
+
+"Then," he said, "will you at least do me the favor of
+getting from between me and God's light?  If I die, I may go
+to hell, but I prefer not to see devils this side of it,
+thank you."
+
+The girl went away, but presently came back.  She lowered
+something to him on a string.  "I got it out of one of your
+holsters," she said.
+
+Aladdin's fingers closed on the butt of a revolver.
+
+"It may save you a certain amount of hunger and pain," she
+said.  "When you are dead, we will give it to one of our men,
+and your horse too.  He's a beauty."
+
+"I hope to God he may--" began Aladdin.
+
+"Pretty!" said the girl.
+
+She went away, and he heard her clucking to the chickens.
+After a time she came back.  Aladdin was waiting with a plan.
+
+"Don't move," he said, "or you'll be shot."
+
+"Rubbish!" said the girl.  She leaned casually back from the
+hole, and he could hear her moving away and clucking to the
+chickens.  Again she returned.
+
+"Thank you for not shooting," she said.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"Are you dead?" she said.
+
+When he came to, there was a bright light in Aladdin's eyes,
+for a lantern swung just to the left of his head.
+
+"I thought you were dead," said the girl, still from her
+point of advantage.  The lantern's light was in her face,
+too, and Aladdin saw that it was beautiful.
+
+"Won't you help me?" he said plaintively.
+
+"Were you ever told that you had nice eyes?" said the girl.
+
+Aladdin groaned.
+
+"It bores you to be told that?"
+
+"My dear young lady," said Aladdin, "if you were as kind as
+you are beautiful--"
+
+"How about your horse kicking me to a certain place?  That
+was what you started to say, you know."
+
+"Lady--lady," said Aladdin, "if you only knew how I'm
+suffering, and I'm just an ordinary young man with a
+sweetheart at home, and I don't want to die in this hole.
+And now that I look at you," he said, "I see that you're not
+so much a girl as an armful of roses."
+
+"Are you by any chance--Irish?" said the girl, with a laugh.
+
+"Faith and of ahm that," said Aladdin, lapsing into full
+brogue; "oi'm a hireling sojer, mahm, and no inimy av yours,
+mahm."
+
+"What will you do for me if I help you?" said the girl.
+
+"Anything," said Aladdin.
+
+"Will you say 'God save Jefferson Davis, President of the
+Confederate States of America,' and sing 'Dixie'--that is, if
+you can keep a tune.  'Dixie''s rather hard."
+
+"I'll 'God bless Jefferson Davis and every future President
+of the Confederate States, if there are any,' ten million
+times, if you'll help me out, and--"
+
+"Will you promise not to fight any more?"
+
+A long silence.
+
+"No."
+
+"You needn't do the other things either," said the girl,
+presently.  Her voice, oddly enough, was husky.
+
+"I thought it would be good to see a Yankee suffer," she said
+after a while, "but it isn't."
+
+"If you could let a ladder down," said Aladdin, "I might be
+able to get up it."
+
+"I'll get one," said the girl.  Then she appeared to reflect.
+"No," she said; "we must wait till dark.  There are people
+about, and they'd kill you.  Can you live in that hole till
+dark?"
+
+"If you could throw down a lot of hay," said Aladdin.  "It's
+very wet down here and hard."
+
+The girl went, and came with a bundle of hay.
+
+"Look out for the lantern," she called, and threw the hay
+down to him.  She brought, in all, seven large bundles and
+was starting for the eighth, when, by a special act of
+Providence, the flooring gave again, and she made an
+excellent imitation of Aladdin's shute on the previous
+evening.  By good fortune, however, she landed on the soft
+hay and was not hurt beyond a few scratches.
+
+"Did you notice," she said, with a little gasp, "that I
+didn't scream?"
+
+"You aren't hurt, are you?" said Aladdin.
+
+"No," she said; "but--do you realize that we can't get out,
+now?"
+
+She made a bed of the hay.
+
+"You crawl over on that," she said.
+
+Aladdin bit his lips and groaned as he moved.
+
+"It's really broken, isn't it?" said the girl. Aladdin lay
+back gasping.
+
+"You poor boy," she said.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+The girl borrowed Aladdin's pocket-knife and began whittling
+at a fragment of board.  Then she tore several yards of
+ruffle from her white petticoat, cut his trouser leg off
+below the knee, cut the lacings of his boot, and bandaged his
+broken leg to the splint she had made.  All that was against
+a series of most courteous protests, made in a tearful voice.
+
+When she had done, Aladdin took her hand in his and kissed
+the fingers.
+
+"They're the smallest sisters of mercy I ever saw," said he.
+She made no attempt to withdraw her hand.
+
+"It was stupid of me to fall through," she said.
+
+"Isn't there any possible way of getting out?"
+
+"No; the walls are stone."
+
+"O Lord!" said Aladdin.
+
+"I'm glad I repented before I fell through," said the girl.
+
+"So am I," said Aladdin.
+
+"What were you doing in our stable?" said the girl.
+
+"I got lost, and came in for shelter."
+
+"You came to the house first.  I heard you knocking, and saw
+you from the window.  But I wouldn't let you in, because my
+father and brother were away, and besides, I knew you were a
+Yankee."
+
+"It was too dark to see my uniform."
+
+"I could tell by the way you rode."
+
+"Is it as bad as that?"
+
+"No--but it's different."
+
+The girl laid her hand on Aladdin's forehead.
+
+"You've got fever," she said.
+
+"It doesn't matter," said Aladdin, politely.
+
+"Does your leg hurt awfully?"
+
+"It doesn't matter."
+
+"Did any one ever tell you that you were very civil for a
+Yankee?"
+
+"It doesn't matter," said Aladdin.
+
+She looked at him shrewdly, and saw that the light of reason
+had gone out of his eyes.  She wetted her handkerchief with
+the cold, filthy water spread over the cellar floor and laid
+it on his forehead.  Aladdin spoke ramblingly or kept silence.
+Every now and then the girl freshened the handkerchief, and
+presently Aladdin fell into a troubled sleep.
+
+When he awoke his mind was quite clear.  The lantern still
+burned, but faintly, for the air in the cellar was becoming
+heavy.  Beside him on the straw the girl lay sleeping.  And
+overhead footsteps sounded on the stable floor.  He remembered
+what the girl had said about the people who would kill him if
+they found him, and blew out the lantern.  Then, his hand over
+her mouth, he waked the girl.
+
+"Don't make a noise," he said.  "Listen."
+
+The girl sat up on the straw.
+
+"I'll call," she whispered presently, "and pretend you're not
+here."
+
+"But the horse?"
+
+"I'll lie about him."
+
+She raised her voice.
+
+"Who's there?" she called.
+
+"It's I--Calvert.  Where are you?"
+
+"Listen," she answered; "I've fallen through the floor into
+the cellar.  Don't you see where it's broken?"
+
+The footsteps approached.
+
+"You're not hurt, are you?"
+
+"No; but don't come too close, don't try to look down; the
+floor's frightfully rickety.  Isn't there a ladder there
+somewhere?"
+
+A man laughed.
+
+"Wait," he said.  They heard his footsteps and laughter
+receding.  Presently the bottom of a ladder appeared through
+the hole in the floor.
+
+"Look out for your head," said the man.
+
+The girl rose and guided the ladder clear of Aladdin's head.
+
+"What have you done with the Yankee's horse?" she called.
+
+"He's here."
+
+"Where's the Yankee, do you suppose?"
+
+"We think he must have run off into the woods."
+
+"That's what I thought."
+
+The girl began to mount the ladder.
+
+"I'm coming up," she said.
+
+She disappeared, and the ladder was withdrawn.
+
+She came back after a long time, and there were men with her.
+
+"It's all right, Yankee," she called down the hole.  "They're
+your own men, and I'm the prisoner now."
+
+The ladder reappeared, and two friendly men in blue came down
+into the cellar.
+
+"Good God!" they said.  "It's Aladdin O'Brien!"
+
+Hannibal St. John and Beau Larch lifted Aladdin tenderly and
+took him out of his prison.
+
+Outside, tents were being pitched in the dark, and there was a
+sound of axes.  Fires glowed here and there through the woods
+and over the fields, and troops kept pouring into the
+plantation.  They laid Aladdin on a heap of hay and went to
+bring a stretcher.  The girl sat down beside him.
+
+"You'll be all right now," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Aladdin.
+
+"And go home to your sweetheart."
+
+"Yes," said Aladdin, and he thought of the tall violets on the
+banks of the Maine brooks, and the freshness of the sea.
+
+"What is her name?" said the girl.
+
+"Margaret," said Aladdin.
+
+"Mine's Ellen," said the girl, and it seemed as if she sighed.
+
+Aladdin took her hand.
+
+"You 've been very good to me," he said, and his voice grew
+tender, for she was very beautiful, "and I'll never forget
+you," he said.
+
+"Oh, me!" said the girl, and there was a silence between them.
+
+"I tried to help you," said the girl, faintly, "but I wasn't
+very good at it."
+
+"You were an angel," said Aladdin.
+
+"I don't suppose we'll ever see each other again, will we?"
+said the girl.
+
+"I don't know," said Aladdin.  "Perhaps I'll come back some
+day."
+
+"It's very silly of me--"said the girl.
+
+"What?" said Aladdin.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+He closed his eyes, for he was very weak.  It seemed as if a
+great sweetness came close to his face, and he could have
+sworn that something wet and hot fell lightly on his forehead;
+but when he opened his eyes, the girl was sitting aloof, her
+face in the shadow.
+
+"I dreamed just then," said Aladdin, "that something wonderful
+happened to me.  Did it?"
+
+"What would you consider wonderful?"
+
+Aladdin laid a finger on his forehead; he drew it away and saw
+that the tip was wet.
+
+"I couldn't very well say," he said.
+
+The girl bent over him.
+
+"It nearly happened," she said.
+
+"You are very wonderful and beautiful," said Aladdin.
+
+Her eyes were like stars, and she leaned closer.
+
+"Are you going to go on fighting against my people?" she said.
+
+Roses lay for a moment on his lips.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+He made no sign.  If she had kissed him again he would have
+renounced his birthright and his love.
+
+"God bless and keep you, Yankee," she said.
+
+Tears rushed out of Aladdin's eyes.
+
+"They're coming to take you away," she said.  "Good-by."
+
+"Kiss me again," said Aladdin, hoarsely.
+
+She looked at him quietly for some moments.
+
+"And your sweetheart?" she said.
+
+Aladdin covered his face with his arm.
+
+"Poor little traitor," said the girl, sadly.  She rose and,
+without looking back, moved slowly up the road toward the
+house.
+
+Nor did Aladdin ever see her again, but in after years the
+smell of box or roses would bring into his mind the wonderful
+face of her, and the music of her voice.
+
+In the delirium which was upon him all that night, he harped
+to the surgeon of Ellen, and in the morning fell asleep.
+
+"Haec olim meminisse juvabit," said the surgeon, as
+rain-clouded dawn rose whitely in the east.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Aladdin was jolted miserably down the Peninsula in a white
+ambulance, which mules dragged through knee-deep mud and over
+flowing, corduroy roads.  He had fever in his whole body,
+anguish in one leg, and hardly a wish to live.  But at Fort
+Monroe the breezes came hurrying from the sea, like so many
+unfailing doctors, and blew his fever back inland where it
+belonged.  He lay under a live-oak on the parade  ground and
+once more received the joy of life into his heart.  When he
+was well enough to limp about, they gave him leave to go home;
+and he went down into a ship, and sailed away up the laughing
+Chesapeake, and up the broad Potomac to Washington.  There he
+rested during one night, and in the morning took train for New
+York.  The train was full of sick and wounded going home, and
+there was a great cheerfulness upon them all.  Men joined by
+the brotherhood of common experience talked loudly, smoked
+hard, and drank deep.  There was tremendous boasting and the
+accounting of unrivaled adventures.  In Aladdin's car,
+however, there was one man who did not join in the fellowship,
+for he was too sick.  He had been a big man and strong, but he
+looked like a ghost made of white gossamer and violet shadows.
+His own mother would not have recognized him.  He lay back
+into the corner of a seat with averted face and closed eyes.
+The more decent-minded endeavored, on his account, to impose
+upon the noisy a degree of quiet, but their efforts were
+unavailing.  Aladdin, drumming with his nails upon the
+windowpane, fell presently into soft song:
+
+        Give me three breaths of pleasure
+         After three deaths of pain,
+        And make me not remeasure
+         The ways that were in vain.
+
+Men grew silent and gathered to hear, for Aladdin's fame as a
+maker of songs had spread over the whole army, and he was
+called the Minstrel Major.  He felt his audience and sang
+louder.  The very sick man turned a little so that he, too,
+could hear.  Only the occasional striking of a match or the
+surreptitious drawing of a cork interrupted.  The stately tune
+moved on:
+
+        The first breath shall be laughter,
+         The second shall be wine;
+        And there shall follow after
+         A kiss that shall be mine.
+
+Somehow all the homing hearts were set to beating.
+
+        Roses with dewfall laden
+         One garden grows for me;
+        I call them kisses, maiden,
+         And gather them from thee.
+
+The very sick man turned fully, and there was a glad light of
+recognition in his eyes.
+
+        Give me three kisses only--
+         Then let the storm break o'er
+        The vessel beached and lonely
+         Upon the lonely shore.
+
+If Aladdin's singing ever moved anybody particularly, it was
+Aladdin, and that was why it moved other people.  He sang on
+with tears in his voice
+
+        Give me three breaths of pleasure
+         After three deaths of pain,
+        And I will no more treasure
+         The hopes that are in vain.
+
+There was silence for a moment, more engaging than applause,
+and then applause.  Aladdin was in his element, and he
+wondered what he would best sing next if they should ask him
+to sing again, and this they immediately did.  The train was
+jolting along between Baltimore and Philadelphia.  There was
+much beer in the bellies of the sick and wounded, and much
+sentiment in their hearts.  Aladdin's finger was always on the
+pulse of his audience, and he began with relish:
+
+     Oh, shut and dark her window is
+      In the dark house on the hill,
+     But I have come up through the lilac walk
+      To the lilt of the whippoorwill,
+     With the old years tugging at my hands
+      And my heart which is her heart still.
+
+There was another man in the car whose whole life centered
+about a house on a hill with a lilac walk leading up to it.
+He was the very sick man, and a shadow of red color came into
+his cheeks.
+
+     They said, "You must come to the house once more,
+      Ere the tale of your years be done,
+     You must stand and look up at her window again,
+      Ere the sands of your life are run,
+     As the night-time follows the lost daytime,
+      And the heart goes down with the sun."
+
+There were tears in the very sick man's eyes, for the future
+was hidden from him.  Aladdin sang on:
+
+     Though her window be darkest of every one,
+      In the dark house on the hill,
+     Yet I turn to it here from this ruin of grass,
+      She has leaned on that window's sill,
+     And dark it is, but there is, there is
+      An echo of light there still!
+
+There was great applause from the drunk and sentimental.  And
+Aladdin lowered his eyes until it was over.  When he raised
+them it was to encounter those of the very sick man.  Aladdin
+sprang to his feet with a cry and went limping down the aisle.
+
+"Peter," he cried, "by all that's holy!"
+
+All the tenderness of the Celt gushed into Aladdin's heart as
+he realized the pitiful condition and shocking emaciation of
+his friend.  He put his arm gently about him, and thus they
+sat until the journey's end.  In New York they separated.
+
+Aladdin rested that night and boarded an early morning
+train for Boston.  He settled himself contentedly behind a
+newspaper, and fell to gathering news of the army.  But
+it was difficult to read.  A sentence beginning like this:
+"Rumors of a savage engagement between the light horse
+under" would shape itself like this: "I am going to see
+Margaret to-morrow--to-morrow--to-morrow--I am going to
+see Margaret to-morrow-tomorrow--and God is good--is
+good--is good."
+
+Oddly enough, there was another man in the car who was having
+precisely the same difficulty in deciphering his newspaper.
+At about the same time they both gave up the attempt; and
+their eyes met.  And they laughed aloud.  And presently,
+seated together, they fell into good talk, but each refrained
+pointedly from asking the other where he was going.
+
+With a splendid assumption of innocence, they drove together
+across Boston, and remarking nothing on the coincidence, each
+distinctly heard the other checking his luggage for Portland,
+Maine.
+
+Side by side they rolled out of Portland and saw familiar
+trees and hills go by.  Presently Aladdin chuckled:
+
+"Where are you going, Peter, anyway?" he said.
+
+"Just where you are," said Peter.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+Peter," said Aladdin, presently, "it seems to me that for two
+such old friends we are lacking in confidence.  I know
+precisely what you are thinking about, and you know precisely
+what I am.  We mustn't play the jealous rivals to the last;
+and to put it plainly, Peter, if God is going to be good to
+you instead of me, why, I'm going to try and thank God just
+the same.  A personal disappointment is a purely private
+matter and has no license to upset old ties and affections.
+Does it occur to you that we are after the same thing and that
+one of us isn't going to get it?"
+
+"We won't let it make any difference," said Peter, stoutly.
+
+"That's just it," said Aladdin.  "We mustn't."
+
+"The situation--"Peter began.
+
+"Is none the less difficult, I know.  Here we are with a
+certain amount of leave to occupy as we each see fit.  And,
+unfortunately, there's only one thing which seems fit to
+either of us.  And, equally unfortunately, it's something we
+can't hold hands and do at the same time.  Shall I go straight
+from the station to Mrs. Brackett's and wait until you've had
+your say, Peter?--not that I want to wait very long," he
+added.
+
+"That wouldn't be at all fair," said Peter.
+
+"Do you mind," said Aladdin after a pause, "telling me about
+what your chances are?"
+
+Peter reddened uncomfortably.
+
+"I'm afraid they're not very good, 'Laddin," he said.  "She
+--she said she wasn't sure.  And that's a good deal more apt
+to mean nothing than everything, but I can't straighten my
+life out till I'm sure."
+
+"My chances," said Aladdin, critically, "shouldn't by rights
+be anywhere near as good as yours, but as long as they remain
+chances I feel just the same as you do about yours, and want
+to get things straightened out.  But if I were any kind of a
+man, I'd drop it, because I'm not in her class."
+
+"Nonsense," said Peter.
+
+"No, I'm not," said Aladdin, gloomily.  "I know that.  But,
+Peter, what is a man going to do, a single, solitary, pretty
+much good-for-nothing man, with three great bouncing Fates
+lined up against him?"
+
+Peter laughed his big, frank laugh.
+
+"Shall we chuck the whole thing," said Aladdin, "until it's
+time to go back to the army?"
+
+"No," said Peter, "that would be shirking; it's got to be
+settled one way or another very quickly."  He became grave
+again.
+
+"I think so, too, Peter," said Aladdin.  "And I think that if
+she takes one of us it will be a great sorrow for the other."
+
+"And for her," said Peter, quietly.
+
+"Perhaps," said Aladdin, whimsically, "she won't take either
+of us."
+
+"That," said Peter, "should be a great sorrow for us both."
+
+"I know," said Aladdin.  "Anyway, there's got to be sorrow."
+
+"I think I shall bear it better," said Peter, "if she takes
+you, 'Laddin."
+
+A flash of comparison between his somewhat morbid and warped
+self and the bigness and nobility of his friend passed through
+Aladdin's mind.  He glanced covertly at the strong, emaciated
+face beside him, and noted the steadiness and purity of the
+eyes.  A little quixotic flame, springing like an orchid from
+nothing, blazed suddenly in his heart, and for the instant he
+was the better man of the two.
+
+"I hope she takes you, Peter," he said.
+
+They rolled on through the midsummer woods, heavy with bright
+leaves and waist-deep with bracken; little brooks, clean as
+whistles, piped away among immaculate stones, and limpid light
+broken by delicious shadows fell over all.
+
+"Who shall ask her first?" said Aladdin.  Peter smiled.
+"Shall we toss for it?" said Aladdin.  Peter laughed gaily.
+"Do you really want it to be like that?" he said.
+
+"What's the use of our being friends," said Aladdin, "if we
+are not going to back each other up in this of all things?"
+
+"Right!" said Peter.  "But you ought to have the first show
+because you mentioned it first."
+
+"Rubbish!" said Aladdin.  "We'll toss, but not now; we'll wait
+till we get there."
+
+Peter looked at his watch.
+
+"Nearly in," he said.
+
+"Yes," said Aladdin.  "I know by the woods."
+
+"Did you telegraph, by any chance?" said Peter.  "Because I
+didn't."
+
+"Nor I," said Aladdin; "I didn't want to be met."
+
+"Nor I," said Peter.
+
+The sick man and the lame man will take hands and hobble up
+the hill," said Aladdin.  "And whatever happens, they mustn't
+let anything make any difference."
+
+"No," said Peter, "they mustn't."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Our veterans walked painfully through the town and up the
+hill; nor were they suffered to go in peace, for right and
+left they were recognized, and people rushed up to shake them
+by the hands and ask news of such an one, and if Peter's
+bullet was still in him, and if it was true, which of course
+they saw it wasn't, that Aladdin had a wooden leg.  Aladdin,
+it must be owned, enjoyed these demonstrations, and in spite
+of his lameness strutted a little.  But Peter, white from the
+after effects of his wound and weary with the long travel, did
+not enjoy them at all.  Then the steep pitch of the hill was
+almost too much for him, and now and again he was obliged to
+stop and rest.
+
+The St. Johns' house stood among lilacs and back from the
+street by the breadth of a small garden.  In the rear were
+large grounds, fields, and even woods.  The place had two
+entrances, one immediately in front of the house for people on
+foot, and the other, a quarter of a mile distant, for people
+driving.  This latter, opening from a joyous country lane of
+blackberry-vines and goldenrod, passed between two prodigious
+round stones, and S-ed into a dark and stately wood.  Trees,
+standing gladly where God had set them, made a screen,
+impenetrable to the eye, between the gateway and the house.
+
+Here Peter and Aladdin halted, while Aladdin sent a coin
+spinning into the air.
+
+"Heads!" called Peter.
+
+Aladdin let the piece fall to the ground, and they bent over
+it eagerly.
+
+"After you," said Peter, for the coin read, "Tails."
+
+Aladdin picked up the coin, and hurled it far away among the
+trees.
+
+"That's our joint sacrifice to the gods, Peter," he said.
+
+Peter gave him five cents.
+
+"My share," he said.
+
+"Peter," said Aladdin, "I will ask her the first chance I get,
+and if there's nothing in it for me, I will go away and leave
+the road clear for you.  Come."
+
+"No," said Peter; "you've got your chance now.  And here I
+wait until you send me news."
+
+"Lord!" said Aladdin, "has it got to be as sudden as this?"
+
+"Let's get it over," said Peter.
+
+"Very good," said Aladdin.  "I'll go.  But, Peter, whatever
+happens, I won't keep you long in suspense."
+
+"Good man," said Peter.
+
+Aladdin turned his face to the house like a man measuring a
+distance.  He drew a deep breath.
+
+"Well--here goes," he said, and took two steps.
+
+"Wait, 'Laddin," said Peter.
+
+Aladdin turned.
+
+"Can I have your pipe?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Aladdin turned over his pipe and pouch.  "I'm afraid it's a
+little bitter," he said.
+
+Again he started up the drive; but Peter ran after him.
+
+"'Laddin," he cried, "wait--I forgot something."
+
+Aladdin came back to meet him.
+
+"Aladdin," said Peter, "I forgot something."  He held out his
+hand, and Aladdin squeezed it.
+
+"Aladdin," said Peter, "from the bottom of my heart I wish you
+luck."
+
+When they separated again there were tears in the eyes of
+both.
+
+Just before the curtain of trees quite closed the view of
+the gate, Aladdin turned to look at Peter.  Peter sat upon
+one of the big stones that marked the entrance, smoking and
+smoking.  He had thrown aside his hat, and his hair shone
+in the sun.  There was a kind of wistfulness in his poise, and
+his calm, pure eyes were lifted toward the open sky.  A great
+hero-worship surged in Aladdin's heart, and he thought that
+there was nothing that he would not do for such a friend.  "He
+gave you your life once," said a little voice in Aladdin's
+heart; "give him his.  He is worth a million of you; don't
+stand in his way."
+
+Aladdin turned and went on, and the well-known house came into
+view, but he saw only the splendid, wistful man at the gate,
+waiting calmly, as a gentleman should, for life or death, and
+smoking smoking.
+
+Even as he made his resolve, a lump of self-pity rose in
+Aladdin's throat.  That was the old Adam in him, the base clay
+out of which springs the fair flower of self-sacrifice.
+
+He tried a variety of smiles, for he wished to be easy in the
+difficult part which he had so suddenly, and in the face of
+all the old years, elected to play.  "He must know by the
+look of me," said Aladdin, "that I do not love her any more,
+for, God help me, I can't say it."
+
+He found her on the broad rear veranda of the house.  And
+instead of going up to her and taking her in his arms,--for he
+had planned this meeting often, as the stars could tell, he
+stood rooted, and said:
+
+"Hallo, Margaret!"
+
+He acted better than he knew, for the great light which had
+blazed for one instant in her eyes on first seeing him went
+out like a snuffed candle, and he did not see it or know that
+it had blazed.  Therefore his own cruelty was hidden from him,
+and his part became easier to play.  They shook hands, and
+even then, if he had not been blinded with the egotism of
+self-sacrifice, he might have seen.  That was his last chance.
+For Margaret's heart cried to her, "It is over," and in
+believing it, suddenly, and as she thought forever, an older
+sweetness came in her face.
+
+"You've changed, Aladdin," she said.
+
+"Yes, I'm thinner, if possible," said Aladdin, "almost
+willowy.  Do you think it's becoming?"
+
+"I am not sure," said Margaret.  "The fact remains that I'm
+more than glad to see you."
+
+Aladdin fumbled for speech.
+
+"I'm still a little lame, you see," he said apologetically,
+and took several steps to show.
+
+"Very!" said Margaret, in such a voice that Aladdin wondered
+what she meant.
+
+"But it doesn't hurt any more."
+
+"Then that's all right."
+
+"Where's Jack?" he asked at length.
+
+Margaret became very grave.
+
+"I'm afraid we've betrayed our trust, Aladdin," she said.
+"Because only yesterday he slipped away and left a little note
+to say that he was going to enlist.  We're very much
+distressed about it."
+
+"Perhaps it's better so," said Aladdin, "if he really wanted
+to go.  Did he leave any address?"
+
+"None whatever; he simply vanished."
+
+"Ungrateful little brute!" said Aladdin.  Then he bethought
+him of Peter.  "I'll come back later, Margaret," he said, "but
+it behooves me to go and look up the good Mrs. Brackett."
+
+He hardly knew how he got out of the house.  He felt like a
+criminal who has been let off by the judge.
+
+The sun was now low, and the shadows long and black.  Aladdin
+found Peter where he had left him, balancing on the great
+stone at the entrance, and sending up clouds of smoke.  He
+rose when he saw Aladdin, and he looked paler and more worn.
+"Peter," said Aladdin, "from the bottom of my heart I wish you
+luck."
+
+Aladdin had never seen just such a look as came into Peter's
+eyes; at once they were full of infinite pity, and at peace
+with the whole world.
+
+"Peter," said Aladdin, "give me back my pipe."  His voice
+broke in spite of himself, for he had given up golden things.
+"I--" he said, "I'll wait here a little while, but if--if all
+goes well, Peter, don't you bother to come back."
+
+They clasped hands long and in silence.  Then Peter turned
+with a gulp, and, his weakness a thing of the past, went
+striding up the driveway.  But Aladdin sat down to wait.
+And now a great piping of tree-frogs arose in all that
+country.  Aladdin waited for a long time.  He waited until the
+day gave way to twilight and the sun went down.  He waited
+until the twilight turned to dark and the stars came out.  He
+waited until, after all the years of waiting and longing, his
+heart was finally at peace.  And then he rose to go.
+
+For Peter had not yet come.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Book III
+
+
+  "Where are the tall men that marched on the right,
+    That marched to the battle so handsome and tall?
+   They 've been left to mark the places where they saw the foemen's faces,
+   For the fever and the lead took them all, Jenny Orde,
+    The fever and the lead took them all.
+
+  "I found him in the forefront of the battle, Kenny Orde,
+    With the bullets spitting up the ground around him,
+   And the sweat was on his brow, and his lips were on his sword,
+   And his life was going from him when I found him.
+
+  "We lowered him to rest, Jenny Orde,
+    With your picture on his breast, Jenny Orde,
+   And the rumble of pursuit was the regiment's salute
+    To the man that loved you best, Jenny Orde."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+As a dam breaking gives free passage to the imprisoned waters,
+and they rush out victoriously, so Vicksburg, starving and
+crumbling in the West, was about to open her gates and set the
+Father of Waters free forever.  That was where the Union
+hammer, grasped so firmly by strong fingers that their
+knuckles turned white, was striking the heaviest blows upon
+the cracking skull of the Confederacy.  On the other hand,
+Chancellorsville had verged upon disaster, and the powers of
+Europe were waiting for one more Confederate victory in order
+to declare the blockade of Southern ports at an end, and to
+float a Southern loan.  That a Confederate victory was to be
+feared, the presence in Northern territory of Lee, grasping
+the handle of a sword, whose splendid blade was seventy
+thousand men concentrated, testified.  That Lee had lost the
+best finger of his right hand at Chancellorsville was but
+job's comfort to the threatened government at Washington.
+That government was still, after years of stern fighting,
+trying generals and finding them wanting.  But now the Fates,
+in secret conclave, weighed the lots of Union and Disunion;
+and that of Disunion, though glittering and brilliant like
+gold, sank heavily to the ground, as a great eagle whose wing
+is broken by the hunter's bullet comes surely if fiercely
+down, to be put to death.
+
+Early on the morning of July 1, 1863, Lee found himself in the
+neighborhood of a small and obscure town named Gettysburg.  A
+military invasion is the process of occupying in succession a
+series of towns.  To occupy Gettysburg, which seemed as
+possible as eating breakfast, Lee sent forward a division of a
+corps, and followed leisurely with all his forces.  But
+Gettysburg and the ridges to the west of Gettysburg were
+already occupied by two brigades of cavalry, and those, with a
+cockiness begotten of big lumps of armed friends approaching
+from the rear, determined to go on occupying.  This, in a
+spirit of great courage, with slowly increasing forces,
+against rapidly increasing forces, they did, until the brisk
+and pliant skirmish which opened the business of the day had
+grown so in weight and ferocity that it was evident to the
+least astute that the decisive battle of the New World was
+being fought.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+There was a pretty girl in Manchester, Maryland (possibly
+several, but one was particularly pretty), and Aladdin,
+together with several young officers (nearly all officers were
+young in that war) of the Sixth Army Corps, rather flattered
+himself that he was making an impression.  He was all for
+making impressions in those days.  Margaret was engaged to
+marry Peter--and a pretty girl was a pretty girl.  The pretty
+girl of Manchester had several girls and several officers to
+tea on a certain evening, and they remained till midnight,
+making a great deal of noise and flirting outrageously in dark
+corners.  Two of the girls got themselves kissed, and two of
+the officers got their ears boxed, and later a glove each to
+stick in their hat-bands.  At midnight the party broke up with
+regret, and the young officers, seeking their quarters, turned
+in, and were presently sleeping the sleep of the constant in
+heart.  But Aladdin did not dream about the pretty girl of
+Manchester, Maryland.  When he could not help himself--under
+the disadvantage of sleep, when suddenly awakened, or when
+left alone--his mind harped upon Margaret.  And often the
+chords of the harping were sad chords.  But on this particular
+night he dreamed well.  He dreamed that her little feet did
+wrong and fled for safety unto him.  What the wrong was he
+knew in his dream, but never afterward--only that it was a
+dreadful, unforgivable wrong, not to be condoned, even by a
+lover.  But in his dream Aladdin was more than her lover, and
+could condone anything.  So he hid her feet in his hands until
+those who came to arrest them had passed, and then he waked to
+find that his hands were empty, and the delicious dream over.
+He waked also to find that it was still dark, and that the
+Sixth Army Corps was to march to a place called Taneytown,
+where General Meade had headquarters.  He made ready and
+presently was riding by his general at the head of a creaking
+column, under the starry sky.  In the great hush and cool that
+is before a July dawn, God showed himself to the men, and they
+sang the "Battle-hymn of the Republic," but it sounded sweetly
+and yearningly, as if sung by thousands of lovers:
+
+  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
+  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
+  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword
+  His truth is marching on.
+
+The full sunlight gives man poise and shows him the practical
+side of things, but in the early morning and late at night man
+is seldom quite rational.  He weakly allows himself to dwell
+upon what was not, is not, and will not be.  And so Aladdin,
+during the first period of that march, pretended that Margaret
+was to be his and that all was well.
+
+A short distance out of Manchester the column met with orders
+from General Meade and was turned westward toward Gettysburg.
+With the orders came details of the first day's fight, and
+Aladdin learned of the officer bringing them, for he was a
+Maine man, that Hamilton St. John was among the dead.
+Aladdin and the officer talked long of the poor boy, for both
+had known him well.  They said that he had not been as
+brilliant as John, nor as winning as Hannibal, but so honest
+and reliable, so friendly and unselfish.  They went over his
+good qualities again and again, and spoke of his great
+strength and purity, and of other things which men hold best
+in men.
+
+And now they were riding with the sun in their eyes, and white
+dust rolled up from the swift feet of horses and men.  Wild
+roses and new-mown grass filled the air with delightful
+fragrance, and such fields as were uncut blazed with daisies
+and buttercups.  Over the trimmed lawns about homesteads
+yellow dandelions shone like stars in a green sky.  Men,
+women, and children left their occupations, and stood with
+open mouths and wide eyes to see the soldiers pass.  The sun
+rose higher and the day became most hot, but steadily,
+unflinchingly as the ticking of a clock, the swift, bleeding,
+valiant feet of the Sixth Army Corps stepped off the miles.
+And the men stretched their ears to hear the mumbled distant
+thunder of artillery--that voice of battle which says so much
+and tells so little to those far off.  The Sixth Corps felt
+that it was expected to decide a battle upon Northern soil for
+the North, and marching in that buoyant hope, left scarcely a
+man, broken with fatigue and disappointment, among the wild
+flowers by the side of the way.
+
+If you have ever ridden from Cairo to the Pyramids you will
+remember that at five miles' distance they look as huge as at
+a hundred yards, and that it is not until you actually touch
+them with your hand that you even begin to realize how
+wonderfully huge they really are.  It was so with the thunders
+of Gettysburg.  They sounded no louder, and they connoted no
+more to the column now in the immediate vicinage of the
+battle, than they had to its far-distant ears.  But presently
+the column halted behind a circle of hills, and beheld white
+smoke pouring heavenward as if a fissure had opened in the
+earth and was giving forth steam.  And they beheld in the
+heavens themselves tiny, fleecy white clouds and motionless
+rings, and they knew that shells were bursting and men falling
+upon the slopes beyond the hills.
+
+A frenzy of eagerness seized upon the tired feet, and they
+pressed upward, lightly, like dancers' feet.  Straps creaked
+upon straining breasts, and sweat ran in bubbles.  Then the
+head of the column reached the ridge of a hill, and its
+leaders saw through smarting eyes a great horseshoe of sudden
+death.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+That morning Peter Manners had received a letter, but he had
+not had a chance to open and read it.  It was a letter that
+belonged next to his heart, as he judged by the writing, and
+next to his heart, in a secure pocket, he placed it, there to
+lie and give him strength and courage for the cruel day's
+work, and something besides the coming of night to look
+forward to.  For the rest, he went among the lines, and smiled
+like a boy released from school to see how silently and
+savagely they fought.
+
+The Sixth Corps rested wherever there was shade along the
+banks of Rock Creek, and gathered strength and breath for
+whatever work should be assigned to it.
+
+Aladdin, sharing a cherry-pie with a friend, shivered with
+excitement, for there was a terrific and ever-increasing
+discharge of cannons and muskets on the left, and it seemed
+that the time to go forward again and win glory was at hand.
+Presently one came riding back from the battle.  His face was
+shining with delight, and, sitting like a centaur to the fiery
+plunges of his horse, he swung his hat and shouted.  It was
+Sedgwick's chief of staff, McMahon, and he brought glorious
+news, for he said that the corps was to move toward the heavy
+firing, where the fighting was most severe.
+
+Then the whole corps sprang to its feet and went forward,
+tearing down the fences in its path and trampling the long
+grass in the fields.  A mile away the long, flowery slopes
+ended in a knobbed hill revealed through smoke.  That was
+Little Round Top, and its possession meant victory or defeat.
+The corps was halted and two regiments were sent forward up
+the long slope.  To them the minutes seemed moments.  They
+went like a wave over the crest to the right of the hill, and
+poured down into the valley beyond.  Here the blue flood of
+men banked against a stone wall, spreading to right and left,
+as the waters of a stream spread the length of a dam.  Then
+they began to fire dreadfully into the faces of their enemy,
+and to curse terribly, as is proper in battle.  Bullets stung
+the long line like wasps, and men bit the sod.
+
+Aladdin was ordered to ride up Little Round Top for
+information.  Half-way up he left his horse among the boulders
+and finished the laborious ascent on foot.  At the summit he
+came upon a leaderless battery loading and firing like
+clockwork, and he saw that the rocks were strewn with dead men
+in light-blue Zouave uniforms, who looked as if they had
+fallen in a shower from the clouds.  Many had their faces
+caved in with stones, and terrible rents showed where the
+bayonet had been at work, for in this battle men had fought
+hand to hand like cave-dwellers.  Bullets hit the rocks with.
+stinging blows, and round shot screamed in the air.  Sometimes
+a dead man would be lifted from where he lay and hurled
+backward, while every instant men cried hoarsely and joined
+the dead.  In the midst of this thunder and carnage, Aladdin
+came suddenly upon Peter, smiling like a favorite at a dance,
+and shouted to him.  They grinned at each other, and as
+Aladdin grinned he looked about to see where he could be of
+use, and sprang toward a gun half of whose crew had been
+blasted to death by a bursting shell.  The sweat ran down his
+face, and already it was black with burning powder.  The flash
+of the guns set fire to the clothing of the dead and wounded
+who lay in front, and on the recoil the iron-shod wheels broke
+the bones of those lying behind.  It was impossible to know
+how the fight was going.  It was only possible to go on
+fighting.
+
+There was a voice in front of the battery that kept calling so
+terribly for water that it turned cold the stomachs of those
+that heard.  It came from a Confederate, a general officer,
+who had been wounded in the spine.  Occasionally it was
+possible to see him through the smoke.  Sometimes a convulsion
+seized him, and he beat the ground with his whole body, as a
+great fish that has been drawn from the water beats the deck
+of a vessel.  It was terrible to look at and hear.  Bullets
+and shot tore the ground about the man and showered him with
+dust and stones.  Aladdin shook his canteen and heard the
+swish of water.  It seemed to him, and his knees turned to
+water at the thought, that he must go out into that place
+swept by the fire of both sides, and give relief to his enemy.
+He did not want to go, and fear shook him; but he threw down
+the rammer which he had been serving, and drawing breath in
+long gasps, took a step forward.  His resolve came too late.
+A blue figure slipped by him and went down the slope at a run.
+It was Manners.  They saw him kneel by the dying Confederate
+in the bright sunlight, and then smoke swept between like a
+wave of fog.  The red flashes of the guns went crashing into
+the smoke, and on all sides men fell.  But presently there
+came a star-shaped explosion in the midst of the smoke,
+hurling it back, and they saw Manners again.  He was
+staggering about with his hands over his eyes, and blood was
+running through his fingers.  Even as they looked, a shot
+struck him in the back, and he came down.  They saw his
+splendid square chest heaving, and knew that he was not yet
+dead.  Then the smoke closed in, but this time another figure
+was hidden by the smoke.  For no sooner did Aladdin see Peter
+fall than he sprang forward like a hound from the leash.
+Aladdin kneeled by Manners, and as he kneeled a bullet struck
+his hat from his head, and a round shot, smashing into the
+rocky ground a dozen feet away, filled his eyes with dirt and
+sparks.  There was a pungent smell of brimstone from the
+furious concussions of iron against rock.  A bullet struck the
+handle of Aladdin's sword and broke it.  He unstopped his
+canteen and pressed the nozzle to Manners' lips.  Manners
+sucked eagerly, like an infant at its mother's breast.  A
+bullet struck the canteen and dashed it to pieces.  The
+crashing of the cannon was like close thunder, and the air
+sang like the strings of an instrument.  But Aladdin, so cool
+and collected he was, might have been the target for praises
+and roses flung by beauties.  He put his lips close to Peter's
+ear, and spoke loudly, for the noise of battle was deafening.
+
+"Is it much, darlint?"
+
+Manners turned his bleeding eyes toward Aladdin.
+
+"Go back, you damn little fool!" he said.
+
+"Peter, Peter," said Aladdin, "can't you see?"
+
+"No, I can't.  I'm no use now.  Go back; go back and give 'em
+hell!"
+
+Aladdin endeavored to raise Peter in his arms, but was not
+strong enough.
+
+"I can't lift you, I can't lift you," he said.
+
+"You can't," said Peter.  "Bless you for coming, and go back."
+
+"Shut up, will you?" cried Aladdin, savagely.  "Where are you
+hit?"
+
+"In the back," said Peter, "and I'm done for."
+
+"The hell you are!" said Aladdin.  Tears hotter than blood
+were running out of his eyes.  "What can I do for you, Peter?"
+he said in a husky voice.
+
+Manners' blackened fingers fumbled at the buttons of his coat,
+but he had not the strength to undo them.
+
+"It's there, 'Laddin," he said.
+
+"What's there?" said Aladdin.  He undid the coat with swift,
+clever fingers.
+
+"Let me hold it in my hands," said Peter.
+
+"Is it this--this letter--this letter from Margaret?" asked
+Aladdin, chokingly, for he saw that the letter had not been
+opened.
+
+A shower of dirt and stones fell upon them, and a shell burst
+with a sharp crash above their heads.
+
+"Yes," said Peter.  "Give it to me.  I can't ever read it
+now."
+
+"I can read it for you," said Aladdin.  He was struggling with
+a sob that wanted to tear his throat.
+
+"Will you?  Will you?" cried Peter, and he smiled like a
+beautiful child.
+
+"Sure I will," said Aladdin.
+
+With the palm of his hand he pressed back the streaming sweat
+from his forehead twice and three times.  Then, having wiped
+his hands upon his knees, he drew the battered fragment of his
+sword, and using it as a paper-knife, opened the letter
+carefully, as a man opens letters which are not to be
+destroyed.  Then his stomach turned cold and his tongue grew
+thick and burred.  For the letter which Margaret had written
+to her lover was more cruel than the shell which had blinded
+his eyes and the bullet which was taking his life.
+
+"'Laddin--" this in a fearful voice.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Thank God.  I thought you'd been hit.  Why don't you read?"
+
+Aladdin's eyes, used to reading in blocks of lines rather than
+a word at a time, had at one glance taken in the purport of
+Margaret's letter, and his wits had gone from him.  She called
+herself every base and cruel name, and she prayed her lover to
+forgive her, but she had never had the right to tell him that
+she would marry him, for she had never loved him in that way.
+She said that, God forgive her, she could not keep up the
+false position any longer, and she wished she was dead.
+
+"There's a man at the bottom of this," thought Aladdin.  He
+caught a glimpse of Peter's poor, bloody face and choked.
+
+"I--it--the sheets are mixed," he said presently.  "I'm trying
+to find the beginning.  There are eight pages," he went on,
+fighting for time," and they 're folded all wrong, and they're
+not numbered or anything."
+
+Peter waited patiently while Aladdin fumbled with the sheets
+and tried, to the cracking-point, to master the confusion in
+his mind.
+
+Suddenly God sent light, and he could have laughed aloud.  Not
+in vain had he pursued the muse and sought after the true
+romance in the far country where she sweeps her skirts beyond
+the fingers of men.  Not in vain had he rolled the arduous
+ink-pots and striven manfully for the right word and the
+telling phrase.  The chance had come, and the years of
+preparation had not been thrown away.  He knew that he was
+going to make good at last.  His throat cleared of itself, and
+the choking phlegm disappeared as if before a hot flame of
+joy.  His voice came from between his trembling lips clear as
+a bell, and the thunder of battle rolled back from the plain
+of his consciousness, as, slowly, tenderly, and helped by God,
+he began to speak those eight closely lined pages which she
+should have written.
+
+"My Heart's Darling--" he began, and there followed a molten
+stream of golden and sacred words.
+
+And the very soul of Manners shouted aloud, for the girl was
+speaking to him as she had never spoken before.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+When the fighting was over for that day, Aladdin wrote as
+follows to Margaret:
+
+MARGARET DEAR: Peter was shot down to-day, while doing more
+than his duty by his enemies and by his country and by
+himself, which was always his way.  He will not live very
+long, and you must come to him if it is in any way possible.
+His love for you makes other loves seem very little, and I
+think it would be better that you should walk the streets than
+that you should refuse to come to him now.  He had a letter
+from you, which God, knowing about, blinded him so that he
+could not read it, and he believes that you love him and are
+faithful to him.  It is very merciful of God to let him
+believe that.  He must not be undeceived now, and you must
+come and be lovely to him and pretend and pretend, and make
+his dying beautiful.  I have the right to ask this of you,
+for, next to Peter, I was the one that loved you most.  And
+when I made you think I didn't I lied.  I lied because I felt
+that I was not worthy, and I loved you enough to want you to
+belong to the best man God ever made, and I loved him too.
+And that was why it was.  I tell you because I think you must
+have wondered about it sometimes.  But it was very hard to do,
+and because I did it, and because Peter is what he is, you
+must come to him now.  If God will continue to be merciful,
+you will get here in time.  I hope I may be on hand to see
+you, but I do not know.  Hamilton is gone, and Peter is going,
+and there will be a terrible battle to-morrow, and thousands
+of poor lads will lie on this field forever.  And here, one
+way or another, the war will be decided.  I have not the heart
+to write to you any more, my darling.  You will come to Peter,
+I know, and all will be as well as it can be.  I pray to God
+that I too shall live to see you again, and I ask him to bless
+you and keep you for ever and ever.  Always I see your dear
+face before me in the battle, and sometimes at night God lets
+me dream of you.  I am without dogma, sweetest of all possible
+sweethearts, but this creed I say over and over, and this
+creed I believe: I believe in one God, Maker of heaven and
+Margaret.
+
+        Angels guard you, darling.
+
+                                     ALADDIN.
+GETTYSBURG, July 2, 1863.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+On the morning of the third day of July, young Hannibal St.
+John shaved his face clean and put himself into a new uniform.
+The old nth Maine was no longer a regiment, but a name of
+sufficient glory.  On three occasions it had been shot to
+pieces, and after the third the remaining tens were absorbed
+by other regiments.  Hannibal's father had obtained for him a
+lieutenancy in the United States artillery, Beau Larch was
+second lieutenant in another Maine regiment, and John, the old
+and honored colonel of the nth, was now, like Aladdin, serving
+on a staff.
+
+The battle began with a movement against Johnson on the
+Confederate left, and one against Longstreet on their right.
+
+That against Longstreet became known in history as
+Farnsworth's charge, and Aladdin saw it from the
+signal-station on Little Round Top.
+
+It was a series of blue lines, whose relations to one another
+could not be justly estimated, because of the wooded nature of
+the ground, which ran out into open places before fences and
+woods that spat red fire, and became thinner and of less
+extension, as if they had been made of wax and were melting
+under the blaze of the July sun.  In that charge Farnsworth
+fell and achieved glory.
+
+Aladdin held a field-glass to his eyes with trembling hands,
+and watched the cruel mowing of the blue flowers.  Sometimes
+he recognized a man that he knew, and saw him die for his
+country.  Three times he saw John St. John in the forefront of
+the battle.  The first time he was riding a glorious black
+horse, of spirit and proportions to correspond with those of
+the hero himself.  The second time he was on foot, running
+forward with a-halt in his stride, hatless, and carrying a
+great battle-flag.  Upon the top of it gleamed a gold eagle,
+that nodded toward the enemy.  A dozen blue-coated soldiers,
+straggling like the finishers in a long-distance race,
+followed him with bayonets fixed.  The little loose knot of
+men ran across a field toward a stone wall that bounded it
+upon the other side.  Then white smoke burst from the wall,
+and they were cut down to the last man.  The smoke cleared,
+and Aladdin saw John lying above the great flag which he had
+carried.  A figure in gray leaped the stone wall and ran out
+to him, stooped, and seizing the staff of the flag in both
+hands, braced his hands and endeavored to draw it from beneath
+the great body of the hero.  But it would not come, and as he
+bent closer to obtain a better hold, the back of a great
+clenched hand struck him across the jaw, and he fell like a
+log.  Other men in gray leaped the wall and ran out.  The flag
+came easily now, for St. John was dead; but so was the gray
+brother, for his comrades raised him, and his head hung back
+over his left shoulder, and they saw that his neck had been
+broken like a dry stick.
+
+Aladdin had not been sent to that place to mourn, but to gain
+information.  Twice and three times he wiped his eyes clear of
+tears, and then he swept his faltering glass along the lines
+of the enemy, until, ranged in their center, he beheld a great
+semicircle of a hundred and more iron and brass cannons, and
+movements of troops.  Then Aladdin scrambled down from Little
+Round Top to report what he had seen in the center of the
+Confederate lines.
+
+At one o'clock the Confederate batteries, one hundred and
+fifteen pieces in all, opened their tremendous fire upon the
+center of the Union lines.  Eighty cannons roared back at them
+with defiant thunder, and the blue sky became hidden by smoke.
+Among the Union batteries horses began to run loose, cannons
+to be splintered like fire-wood, and caissons to explode.  At
+these moments men, horses, fragments of men and horses,
+stones, earth, and things living and things dead were hurled
+high into the air with great blasts of flame and smoke, and it
+was possible to hear miles of exultant yells from the hills
+opposite.  But fresh cannon were brought lumbering up at the
+gallop and rolled into the places of those dismantled, shot
+and shell and canister and powder were rushed forward from the
+reserve, and the grim, silent infantry, the great lumbermen of
+Maine and Vermont, the shrill-voiced regiments from New York,
+the shrewd farmers of Ohio and Massachusetts, the deliberate
+Pennsylvanians, and the rest, lay closely, wherever there was
+shelter, and moistened their lips, and gripped their rifles,
+and waited--waited.
+
+For two hours that terrible cannonading was maintained.  The
+men who served the guns looked like stokers of ships, for,
+such was the heat, many of them, casting away first one piece
+of clothing and then another, were half naked, and black sweat
+glistened in streams on their chests and backs.  As sight-seers
+crowd in eagerly by one door of a building where there is an
+exhibition, and come reluctantly out by another and go their
+ways, so the reserves kept pressing to the front, and the
+wounded maintained an unceasing reluctant stream to the rear.
+
+A little before three o'clock Hannibal St. John had his right
+knee smashed by the exploding of a caisson, and fell behind
+one of the guns of his battery.  He was so sure that he was to
+be killed on this day that it had never occurred to him that
+he might be trivially wounded and carried to the rear in
+safety.  An expression of almost comical chagrin came over his
+face, for life was nothing to him, and somewhere far above the
+smoke a goodly welcome awaited him: that he knew.  Men came
+with a stretcher to carry him off, but he cursed them roundly
+and struggled to his well knee.  The cannon behind which he
+had fallen was about to be discharged.
+
+"Give 'em hell!" cried Hannibal.
+
+As he spoke, the piece was fired, and leaping back on the
+recoil, as a frenzied horse that breaks its halter, one of the
+wheels struck him a terrible blow on the body, breaking all
+the ribs on that side and killing him instantly.  His face
+wore a glad smile, and afterward, when Aladdin found him and
+took the gold locket from his pocket, and read the inscription
+written, a great wonder seized men:
+
+                July 3, 1863.
+                Nunc dimittis.
+               Te Deum laudamus.
+
+Thus in one battle fell the three strong hostages which an old
+man had given to fortune.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+Three o'clock the Union batteries were ordered to be silent,
+for it was well known to those in command that presently there
+would be a powerful attack by infantry, for which the
+cannonade was supposed to have paved the way with death and
+disorder, and it was necessary that the pieces should be kept
+cool in order to be in efficient condition to grapple with and
+suppress this attack.  Sometimes a regiment, stung to a frenzy
+of courage by bullets and the death of comrades, will rise
+from its trench without the volition of its officers, and go
+frantically forward against overwhelming odds.  A different
+effect of an almost identical psychological process is
+patience.  Men will sometimes lie as quietly under a rain of
+bullets, in order to get in one effective shot at an enemy, as
+cattle in the hot months will lie under a rain of water to get
+cool.  It was so now.  The whole Union army was seized by a
+kind of bloody deliberation and lay like statues of men,
+while, for quarter of an hour more, the Confederates continued
+to thunder from their guns.  Now and again a man felt lovingly
+the long black tube of a cannon to see if its temperature was
+falling.  Others came hurrying from the rear with relays of
+powder, shot, shell, and canister.
+
+It seemed now to the Confederate leaders that the Union
+batteries had been silenced, and that the time had come for
+Pickett, the Ney of the South, to go forward with all his
+forces.  Only Longstreet demurred and protested against the
+charge.  When Pickett asked him for the order to advance he
+turned away his head sorrowfully and would not speak.  Then
+Pickett, that great leader of men, who was one half daring and
+one half magnetism and all hero, said proudly: "I shall go
+forward, sir."  And turned to his lovers.
+
+Silence and smoke hung over Gettysburg.
+
+Presently out of the smoke on the Confederate side came three
+lines of gray a mile long.  Battle-flags nodded at intervals,
+and swords blazed in the sun.
+
+Very deliberately and with pains about aiming, the Union
+batteries began to hurl solid shot against the gray advance.
+Soon holes were bitten here and there, and occasionally a flag
+went down, to be instantly snatched up and waved defiantly.
+When Pickett, Pettigrew, and the splendid brigade of Cadmus
+Wilcox had reached the bottom of the valley, their
+organization was as unbroken as a parade.  But there shell,
+instead of round shot, met them, and men tasted death by fives
+and tens.  But the lines, drawing together, closed the spaces
+left by mortality, and the flags began to approach each other.
+Then the gray men began to come up the slope, and there were
+thousands of them.  But shell yielded to canister, and the
+muskets of the infantry sent out death in leaden showers, so
+that the great charge began to melt like wax over heat, and
+the flags hung close together like a trophy of battle in a
+chapel.  But still the gray men came.  And now, in a storm of
+flame and smoke, they reached the foremost cannons of the
+Union line, and planted their flags.  So much were they
+permitted for the glory of a lost cause.  For a little, men
+killed one another with the butts of guns, with bayonets, and
+with stones, and then, as the overdrip of a wave broken upon
+an iron coast trickles back through the stones of the beach to
+the ocean, so all that was left of Pickett's great charge
+trickled back down the slope, driblets of gray, running blood.
+For a little while longer the firing continued.  Battle-flags
+were gathered, and thrown together in sheaves.  There was a
+little broken cheering, and to all intents and purposes the
+great war was at an end.
+
+Aladdin, broken with grief and fatigue, went picking his way
+among the dead and wounded.  He had lost Peter and Hannibal in
+that battle, and Hamilton and John were dead; he alone
+remained, and it was not just.  He felt that the Great Reaper
+had spared the weed among the flowers, and he was bitter
+against the Great Reaper.  But there was one more sorrow
+reserved for Aladdin, and he was to blaspheme against the God
+that made him.
+
+There was still desultory firing from both armies.  As when,
+on the Fourth of July, you set off a whole bunch of
+firecrackers, there is at first a crackling roar, and
+afterward a little explosion here and a little explosion
+there, so Gettysburg must have sounded to the gods in Olympus.
+Thunder-clouds begotten of the intense heat rolled across the
+heavens from east to west, accentuating the streaming glory of
+the setting sun, and now distant thunder rumbled, with a sound
+as of artillery crossing a bridge.  Drops of rain fell here
+and there.
+
+Aladdin heard himself called by name, "'Laddin, 'Laddin."
+
+As quickly as the brain is advertised of an insect's sting, so
+quickly did Aladdin recognize the voice and know that his
+brother.  Jack was calling to him.  He turned, and saw a
+little freckled boy, in a uniform much too big for him,
+trailing a large musket.
+
+"Jack!" he cried, and rushed toward him with outstretched
+arms.  "You little beggar, what are you doin' here?"
+
+Jack grinned like one confessing to a successful theft of
+apples belonging to a cross farmer.  And then God saw fit to
+take away his life.  He dropped suddenly, and there came a
+rapid pool of blood where his face had been.  With his arms
+wrapped about the little figure that a moment before had been
+so warlike and gay, Aladdin turned toward the heavens a face
+of white flint.
+
+"I believe in one God, Maker of hell!" he cried.
+
+Thunder rumbled and rolled slowly across the battle-field from
+east, to west.
+
+"I believe in one God, Maker of hell!" cried Aladdin, "Father
+of injustice and doer of hellish deeds!  I believe in two
+damnations, the damnation of the living and the damnation of
+the dead."
+
+He turned to the little boy in his arms, and terrible sobs
+shook his body, so that it appeared as if he was vomiting.
+After a while he turned his convulsed face again to the sky.
+
+"Come down," he cried, "come down, you--"
+
+Far down the hill there was a puff of white smoke, and a
+merciful bullet, glancing from a rock, struck Aladdin on the
+head with sufficient force to stretch him senseless upon the
+ground.
+
+When the news of Gettysburg reached the Northern cities,
+lights were placed in every window, and horns were blown as at
+the coming of a new year.  Senator Hannibal St. John had lost
+his three boys and the hopes of his old age in that terrible
+fight, but he caused his Washington house to be illuminated
+from basement to garret.
+
+And then he walked out in the streets alone, and the tears ran
+down his old cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+There had been a wedding in the hospital tent.  Margaret bent
+over Peter and kissed him goodby.  She was in deep black, and
+by her side loomed a great, dark figure, whose eyes were like
+caverns in the depths of which burned coals.  The great, dark
+man leaned heavily upon a stick, and did not seem conscious of
+what was going on.  The minister who had performed the
+ceremony stood with averted face.  Every now and then he
+moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue.  The wounded in
+neighboring cots turned pitiful eyes upon the girl in black,
+for she was most lovely--and very sad.  Occasionally a throat
+was cleared.
+
+"When you come, darling," said the dying man, "there will be
+an end of sorrow."
+
+"There will be an end of sorrow," echoed the girl.  She bent
+closer to him, and kissed him again.
+
+"It is very wonderful to have been loved," said Peter.  Then
+his face became still and very beautiful.  A smile, innocent
+like that of a little child, lingered upon his lips, and his
+blind eyes closed.
+
+St. John laid his hand upon Margaret's shoulder.
+
+A man, very tall and lean and homely, entered the tent.  He
+was clad in an exceedingly long and ill-fitting frock-coat.
+Upon his head was a high black hat, somewhat the worse for
+wear.  He turned a pair of very gentle and pitying eyes slowly
+over those in the tent.
+
+Aladdin, his head almost concealed by bandages, sat suddenly
+upright in a neighboring cot.  A wild, unreasoning light was
+in his eyes, and marking time with his hand, he burst suddenly
+into the "Battlehymn of the Republic"
+
+  He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call
+         retreat;
+  He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat
+  Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
+         Our God is marching on.
+
+He sang on, and the wounded joined him with weak voices:
+
+  In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
+  With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
+  As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
+         While God is marching on.
+
+The tall man who had entered, to whom every death was nearer
+than his own, and to whom the suffering of others was as a
+crucifixion, removed the silk hat from his head, and wiped his
+forehead with a colored handkerchief.
+
+Margaret knelt by Aladdin and held his unconscious form in her
+arms.
+
+Outside, the earth was bathing in exquisite sunshine.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+It was not long before Aladdin got back the strength of his
+body, but the gray bullet which had come in answer to his cry
+against God, even as the lightning came to Amyas Leigh, in
+that romance to which it is so good to bow, had injured the
+delicate mechanism of his brain, so that it seemed as if he
+would go down to the grave without memory of things past, or
+power upon the hour.  Indeed, the war ended before the
+surgeons spoke of an operation which might restore his mind.
+He went under the knife a little child, his head full of
+pictures, playthings, and fear of the alphabet; he came forth
+made over, and turned clear, wondering eyes to the girl at his
+side.  And he held her hand while she bridged over the years
+for him in her sweet voice.
+
+He learned that she had married Peter, making his death
+peaceful, and he God-blessed her for so doing, while the tears
+ran down his cheeks.
+
+But much of Aladdin that had slept so long was to wake no
+more.  For it was spring when he woke, and waking, he fell in
+love with all living things.
+
+One day he sat with Margaret on the porch of a familiar house,
+and looked upon a familiar river that flowed silverly beyond
+the dark trees.
+
+Senator St. John, very old and very moving, came heavily out
+of the house, and laid his hands upon the shoulders of
+Margaret and Aladdin.  It was like a benediction.
+
+"I have been thinking," said the senator, very slowly, and in
+the voice of an old man, "that God has left some flowers in my
+garden."
+
+"Roses?" said Aladdin, and he looked at Margaret.
+
+"Roses perhaps," said the senator, "and withal some
+bittersweet, but, better than these, and more, he has left me
+heart's-ease.  This little flower," continued the senator, "is
+sown in times of great doubt and sorrow and trouble, and it
+will grow only for a good gardener, one who has learned to bow
+patiently in all things to God's will, and to set his feet
+valiantly against the stony way which God appoints.  I call
+Margaret 'Heart's-ease,' and I call you, too, 'Heart's-ease,'
+Aladdin, for you are becoming like a son to me in my declining
+years.  Consider the river, how it flows," said the old man,
+"smoothly to the sea, asking no questions, and making no
+lamentations against the length of its days, and receiving
+cheerfully into the steadfast current of its going alike the
+bitter waters and the sweet."
+
+We have forgotten Aladdin's songs and the tunes which he made,
+for the people's ear is not tuned to them any more.  But that
+is a little thing.  It is pleasant to think of that night
+when, the knocking of his heart against his ribs louder than
+the knocking of his hand upon her door, he carried to
+Margaret's side the wonderful lamp which, years before, had
+been lighted within him, and which, burning always, now high,
+now low, like the rising and falling tides in the river, had
+at length consumed whatever in his nature was little or base,
+until there was nothing left save those precious qualities,
+love and charity, which fire cannot calcine nor cold freeze.
+Also it is pleasant to think that little children came of
+their love and sang about their everlasting fire.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Aladdin O'Brien, by Gouverneur Morris
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALADDIN O'BRIEN ***
+
+This file should be named lddnb10.txt or lddnb10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, lddnb11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, lddnb10a.txt
+
+
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/lddnb10.zip b/old/lddnb10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5a2c325
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/lddnb10.zip