side. The breeze catches the plume in his hat and flutters it smartly.
The sunshine rests upon his shoulder-straps, lovingly, like a visible
benediction. Straight on he rides. Ten thousand pairs of eyes are fixed
upon him with an intensity that he can hardly fail to feel; ten thousand
hearts keep quick time to the inaudible hoof-beats of his snowy steed.
He is not alone--he draws all souls after him. But we remember that we
laughed! On and on, straight for the hedge-lined wall, he rides. Not a
look backward. O, if he would but turn--if he could but see the love,
the adoration, the atonement!

Not a word is spoken; the populous depths of the forest still murmur
with their unseen and unseeing swarm, but all along the fringe is
silence. The burly commander is an equestrian statue of himself. The
mounted staff officers, their field glasses up, are motionless all. The
line of battle in the edge of the wood stands at a new kind of
"attention," each man in the attitude in which he was caught by the
consciousness of what is going on. All these hardened and impenitent
man-killers, to whom death in its awfulest forms is a fact familiar to
their every-day observation; who sleep on hills trembling with the
thunder of great guns, dine in the midst of streaming missiles, and play
at cards among the dead faces of their dearest friends--all are watching
with suspended breath and beating hearts the outcome of an act involving
the life of one man. Such is the magnetism of courage and devotion.

If now you should turn your head you would see a simultaneous movement
among the spectators--a start, as if they had received an electric
shock--and looking forward again to the now distant horseman you would
see that he has in that instant altered his direction and is riding at
an angle to his former course. The spectators suppose the sudden
deflection to be caused by a shot, perhaps a wound; but take this