Daisy In The Field

For three years or the war! It went to my heart, that

requisition. It looked so terribly in earnest. And so

unhopeful. I wondered, those days, how people could live that

did not know how to pray; when every one had, or might have, a

treasure at stake in this fierce game that was playing. I have

often since felt the same wonder.

I do not know how studies and the usual forms of school

recitations went on; but they did go on; smoothly, I suppose.

I even recollect that mine went on successfully. With my

double or treble motive for desiring success, I had also a

reason for prizing and remembering the attainment. But my head

was on graver matters, all the time. Would the rebels attack,

Washington? it was constantly threatened. Would fighting

actually become the common news of the land? The answer to

this second query began to be sounded audibly. It was before

May was over, that Ellsworth's soldiers took possession of

Alexandria, and he was killed. That stirred people at the

time; it looks a very little thing now. Alexandria! how I

remembered driving through it one grey morning, on one of my

Southern journeys; the dull little place, that looked as if it

had fallen asleep some hundred or two years ago and never

waked up. Now it was waked up with rifle shots; but its slave

pen was emptied. I was glad of that. And Thorold was safe in

Washington, drilling raw soldiers, in the saddle all day, and

very happy, he wrote me. I had begun to be uneasy about his

writing to me. It was without leave from my father and mother,

and the leave I knew could not be obtained; it would follow

that the indulgence must be given up. I knew it must. I looked

that necessity in the face. A correspondence, such a

correspondence, carried on without their knowing of it, must

be an impossibility for me. I intended to tell Christian so,

and stop the letters, before I should go abroad. My

difficulties were becoming daily more and more clear, and

looking more and more unmanageable. I wondered sometimes

whither I was drifting; for guide or choose my course I could

not. I had got into the current by no agency and with no fault

of my own. To get out of the current - perhaps that might not

be till life and I should go out together. So I was a somewhat

sober and diligent student those closing weeks of the term;

and yet, very happy, for Christian loved me. It was a new,

sweet, strange, elixir of life.