elected register of the county. True, there was only a population of about fifty souls in the county town, and the houses were log-cabins, except the temple of justice itself, which was a two-story frame building. But his success was a step on the road to political preferment, and his ambitious eyes were on the future. Into the midst of his quiet incumbency as register came Fate, all intrusive, and found him through the infrequent medium of a weekly mail. It was at the beginning of the retrospective enthusiasm that has served to revive the memories of the War, and he received a letter from an old comrade-in-arms, giving the details of a brigade reunion shortly to be held at no great distance, and, being of the committee, inviting him to be present.

Girard had participated in great military crises; he had marshalled his troop in line of battle; as a mere boy, he had ridden with the guidon lance planted on his stirrup, with the pennant flying above his head, as the marker to lead the fierce and famous Dov-inger Rangers into the thickest of the fight; yet he had never felt such palpitant tremors of excitement as when he stood on the hotel piazza of the New Helvetia Springs, where the banqueters had gathered, and suffered the ordeal of introduction to sundry groups of fashionable ladies. He had earlier seen specimens of the species in the course of military transitions through the cities of the lowlands, and he watched them narrowly to detect if they discerned perchance a difference between him and the men of education and social station with whom his advancement in the army had associated him. He did not reflect that they were too well-bred to reveal any appreciation of such incongruity, but he had never experienced a more ardent glow of gratification than upon overhearing a friend's remark: "Girard is great! Anybody would imagine he was used to all this!"

No strategist was ever more wary. He would not undertake to dance, for he readily perceived that the gyrations in the ball-room were utterly dissimilar to the clumsy capering to which he had been accustomed on the puncheon floor of a mountain cabin. He had the less reason for regret since he was privileged instead to stroll up and down the veranda,—"promenade" was the technical term,—a slender hand, delicately gloved, on the sleeve of his gray uniform, the old regimentals being de rigueur at these reunions. A white ball-gown, such as he had never before seen, fashioned of tissue over lustrous white silk, swayed in diaphanous folds against him, for these were the days of voluminous draperies; a head of auburn hair elaborately dressed gleamed in the moonlight near his shoulder. Miss Alicia Duval thought him tremendously handsome; she adored his record, as she would have said—unaware how little of it she knew—and she did not so much intend to flirt as to draw him out, for there was something about him different from the men of her set, and it stimulated her interest.

"Isn't the moon heavenly!" she observed, gazing at the brilliant orb, now near the full, swinging in the sky, which became a definite blue in its light above the massive dark mountains and the misty valley below; for the building was as near the brink as safety permitted—nearer, the cautious opined.

"Heavenly? Not more'n it's got a right to be. It's a heavenly body, ain't it?" he rejoined.

"Oh, how sarcastic!" she exclaimed. "In what school did you acquire your trenchant style?"

He thought of the tiny district school where he had acquired the very little he knew of aught, and said nothing, laughing constrainedly in lieu of response.

The music of the orchestra came, to them from the ball-room, and the rhythmic beat of dancing feet; the wind lifted her hair gently and brought to them the fragrance of flowering plants and the pungent aroma of mint down in the depths of the ravine hard by, where lurked a chalybeate spring; but for the noisy rout of the dance, and now and again the flimsy chatter of a passing couple on the piazza, promenading like