fondly on his breast.

"Write to my mother. You will see Home again. Tell her how we became
friends. It will comfort her, as it comforts me."

He spoke no more, but faintly signed for a moment towards his hair as it
fluttered in the wind. The Ensign understood him. He smiled again when
he saw that, and, gently turning his face over on the supporting arm as
if for rest, died, with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived
a soul.

No dry eye looked on Ensign Richard Doubledick that melancholy day. He
buried his friend on the field, and became a lone, bereaved man. Beyond
his duty he appeared to have but two remaining cares in life,--one, to
preserve the little packet of hair he was to give to Taunton's mother;
the other, to encounter that French officer who had rallied the men under
whose fire Taunton fell. A new legend now began to circulate among our
troops; and it was, that when he and the French officer came face to face
once more, there would be weeping in France.

The war went on--and through it went the exact picture of the French
officer on the one side, and the bodily reality upon the other--until the
Battle of Toulouse was fought. In the returns sent home appeared these
words: "Severely wounded, but not dangerously, Lieutenant Richard
Doubledick."

At Midsummer-time, in the year eighteen hundred and fourteen, Lieutenant
Richard Doubledick, now a browned soldier, seven-and-thirty years of age,
came home to England invalided. He brought the hair with him, near his
heart. Many a French officer had he seen since that day; many a dreadful