In no questioning, sad pallor of sombre leaves or gray lichens: throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in lilies, white, exultant in a chordant life! Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense, at her freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to hunger or to hope, and learn to be.

And so thinking, the certainty of her aim and work and love yonder comes with a new, vital reality, beside which the story of the yet living men and women of whom I have told you grows vague and incomplete, like unguessed riddles.

I have no key to solve them with,--no right to solve them.
My story is but a mere groping hint?
It lacks determined truth, a certain yea and nay?
It has no conduit of God's justice running through it, awarding apparent good and ill?
I know: it is a story of To-Day.
The Old Year is on us yet.

Poor old Knowles will tell you it is a dark day; bewildered at the inexplicable failure of the cause for which his old blood ran like water that dull morning at Ball's Bluff.

He doubts everything in the bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even, if the very flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic selfishness: if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain truth to give it strength.