my soldier, had he been surrounded by dancing, chattering companions and formed a part of the gay life of Old Point Comfort. I should have observed him only as a brilliant feature of the cruel world that had chosen to condemn me to exile. But in his solitude I felt that we were comrades in sad experience. I knew of only one calamity that could so set apart a human being from his fellow creatures as to bar him from association with his kind. The symptoms were unmistakable and I at once recognized the melancholy officer as a co-victim of whooping cough and gave him the tender pity of one who knew all about his misfortune.

One morning I was skipping along, chattering as usual, inquiring about the little girl whose spiteful tongue had been pulled out by a springbok, asking if the bluejay really did carry tales to the devil, and other queries pertinent to my stage of development, when my grandmother stopped to speak to a friend. I rambled on until I came to a spreading umbrella under which my soldier lay on the sands reading. He was so absorbed in his book that he did not see me till I crawled under the umbrella and looked into his face with, I suppose, all the sympathy that I felt and asked him anxiously if he had the whooping cough, telling him of my mammy's infallible remedy for that malady and assuring him of her willingness to apply it to his case. Then he looked at me, courteously raising his cap and smiling, and I saw that his eyes were gray, shot with changeful lights, twinkling blue with mirthfulness as he gave me a polite good morning. This recalled me to a realization of the demands of good society and I got up and curtsied, wishing him "Good morning" and inquiring concerning his health. He arose and with knightly grace returned my greeting, pointing to a seat for me on the sand, and resumed his own place. Returning to the query with which I had opened the interview he asked why I had taken him for a victim of so juvenile an ailment. I feelingly related my own experience and dwelt upon the oppressive isolation of one so afflicted and said that as he did not associate with other officers nor dance with young ladies and had to swim and read all by himself, as I did, I thought it must be because he was suffering from the same misfortune as that which had deprived me of social pleasures.

He looked at me with a shade of sadness in his face and then I saw that his eyes could be very dark, like the sky sometimes at night when the moon had gone to bed and the stars were only little shimmery specks of light in the darkness piled velvety soft. He told me that he did not have the whooping cough but he had something worse, a broken heart, and he did not like to make others sad with his sorrow.

I had never seen a broken heart, but had some acquaintance with articles that had come to grief in the kitchen and had been restored to pristine wholeness by clever manipulation. I comforted him with the assurance that broken hearts did not signify anything of importance; my mammy could mend them with glue and boil them in milk so you couldn't even see the cracks in them, as she had done with my grandmother's sugar bowl. "How did you break your heart?" I inquired sympathetically. He replied that God broke it when He took from him his loved ones and left him so lonely. In return for his confidence I promised to comfort him for his losses and to be his little girl now and his wife just as soon as I was grown up to be a lady.

He took a ring from his guard-chain and put it on my finger and gave me a tiny gold heart inscribed with "Sally," which had been the name of one of his loved ones, and I crept out from under the umbrella pledged to Lieutenant George E. Pickett of the United States Army. Then and to the end he was my soldier, and always when we were alone I called him "Soldier." I still have the ring and heart, and am indebted for this reminiscence to the little red memorandum book which he gave me years after, when he was General George E. Pickett, of the Confederate Army.

"Come again, little fairy," he said as I was leaving him to the uninterrupted perusal of his book. Just then my grandmother came up, with apologies for my intrusion upon a stranger, and the explanation that my nurse had been sent to the Fort with a note for Lieutenant Pickett, the son of one of her old friends, asking the pleasure of his company to dinner. My new-found friend introduced himself as the officer in question, expressing his pleasure in the meeting and assuring her that my visit had been a charming episode in a monotonous waste of loneliness. I explained:

"I am his little girl now already and am going to be his wife as soon as I am grown up to be a lady."

"Yes, it has all been arranged," he laughed.

From that time loneliness was at an end for me. My soldier had no fear of contagion, assuring me when I asked him if he was too big to have whooping cough that it was a privilege of youth and diminutiveness. We built pine bark yachts and sailboats and steamers and sailed them on the lakes we made by damming up the waves that dashed highest on the shore. The waves of our lakes washed the coasts of every country on the map and our stately ships brought back to us rich cargoes from all the countries of the world. We built forts and garrisoned them with men as brave as those who fell with Leonidas in the great battle of which my soldier told me as we worked. Upon the sea-wall he placed a flag that fluttered defiance to the enemy-ocean as the waves dashed up to our embattled ramparts and rolled back defeated. It was my first introduction to the Star-Spangled Banner and the red and white stripes and star-gemmed sky impressed me as very beautiful. In those days the Stars and Stripes were rarely seen in the Southern States and the flag of Virginia was the only emblem of sovereignty that I had known. My soldier told me the story of the battle-born flag and the eagle that perched upon it amid the smoke of the conflict, the thunder of guns and the lightning of swords.

When I was wearied with the toil incident to our extensive commercial operations and the labors and anxieties of battle we sat upon the sand and he sang to me, playing the accompaniments on his guitar. When I hear those old songs to-day they come to me with the far faint odor of the breezes that swept across the ocean in that long gone time and I hear again the golden notes of that melodious voice mingled with the soft music floating out from the touch of his fingers.

Three years later I saw my soldier again. He had just received his commission as captain and was recruiting his company at Fortress Monroe before sailing for the unknown West. The first real sorrow came to me when I watched the St. Louis, the United States transport, go out to sea with my soldier on board. From her prow floated a flag like that which had waved over the fort we built on the sands in that time when life had lost all its troubles and the sunshine of the heart filled earth and sea and sky with radiance. I felt then as I had not before realized that this was my soldier's flag to which his life was given and to my view the stars in it shone with a new glory.

The St. Louis was bound for Puget Sound where was the new station, Fort Bellingham, which I thought must be farther than the end of the world. Not one ship of our whole great fleet in the olden days had sailed for Puget Sound.