Lebanon Junction, Missouri

OCTOBER 19, 1861.]

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

667

LEBANON JUNCTION, 29 MILES FROM LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, ON THE LOUISVILLE AND NASHVILLE RAILROAD, PRESENT HEAD-QUARTERS OF GENERAL SHERMAN'S BRIGADE OF UNION TROOPS.—SKETCHED BY HENRY MOSLER.—[SEE PAGE 671.]

(Previous Page)alert, with a serious watchfulness. A week after, when her brother announced his own determination to join in the struggle, she did not gainsay it.

On her table now, in place of romances, newspapers and books pertaining to the various struggles for liberty in other countries, and all manner of patriotic addresses that had gone forth from this, found place. She was learning a new lesson. It filled her soul with sorrow and perplexity, but it elevated and enlarged it.

So the days lengthened into weeks.

There came at last a day that will never be forgotten. In one portion of the land church bells were ringing and organ strains ascending on the summer air. In another,

" All into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred."

Sitting in church that morning, through the solemn sweetness of the chants Caroline Mayne was haunted by one sentence—" I owe it to my country !" The organ strains sounded to her like

the dirge of hope, and the hymn had notes of wailing in it. " I owe it to my country!" That noble life ! Was he even then, perhaps, giving it up? She drooped her flushed face, lifting her handkerchief as a shield, when lo ! there dropped from out its folds the little silken token he had left behind—red, white, and blue ! At such times, to imaginative persons, such simple occurrences come like omens. As such it came to her ; and there, in the summer warmth, she grew chill with her emotions.

When, shortly afterward, the awful news came of that vain struggle she felt that her soul had been warned. Then followed the uncertainty of life or death for the beloved. In silence and alone she waited.

One day the bells rang, the cannon roared, and shouts of welcome rent the air. At a sheltered window a fair figure stoled in white watched the returning heroes. Her watch is rewarded : but she can scarcely see for tears as a proud head lifts

itself above the others to her vision and in close company her brother—Edgar Mayne—both safe and before her !

When a bouquet, small and delicate, fell at Jerome Ryversant's feet, he did not doubt its source nor its meaning as he looked at it. A bunch of scarlet kalmias, and red orchis, and beads of golden grain surrounding one rose—a white rose, the heart's gift—and girdling it all a circle of laurel. Thus she spoke to him from her sheltered window. Thus she made her confessions.

Later, when he held her to his heart, with the same noble simplicity which had so endeared her at first, she briefly said,

" I was wrong, and you were right but I sinned through ignorance. Life has wider meanings to me now. This war has been my education."

How truly she said he began to realize as he saw with what clear perceptions she put mere personal ends away and flung her sympathies into the common cause.

He realized it more fully when, a month later, sitting in the " rose-Eden," he put his future in her hands. Should he stay or go? A little lower dropped the head, a little colder grew the clasping hand, a little broken came the sweetest voice, as she answered :

"If three months ago the country needed the services of brave men, we know it needs them now. As you would give up for its cause what is dearer than your own life, I give what is dearer than mine."

While we await the result of this war to our country let us hope that its lessons have been thus nobly received, and that from the claims of pleasure, the fetters of fashion, other women may be able to renounce mere personal ends, and give up with such spiritual insight of love what is dearer than their own lives—what is clearer than any life—a country's salvation. And when they drape their rooms with banners and silken symbols, let them think of the meaning of this—" Red, White, and Blue."

EMBARKATION OF THE NINTH MISSOURI REGIMENT, COLONEL KELTON, AT ST. LOUIS FOR LEXINGTON.—SKETCHED BY ALEXANDER SIMPLOT.—[SEE PAGE 658.]