you. I've a fancy that I shan't come out of our first battle."

The words gave me a queer start, for I had been trying several days to
throw off a similar presentiment concerning him,--a foolish presentiment
that grew out of a dream.

"In case anything of that kind turns up," he continued, "I'd like you to
have my Latin grammar here,--you've seen me reading it. You might stick
it away in a bookcase, for the sake of old times. It goes against me to
think of it falling into rough hands or being kicked about camp and
trampled under foot."

He was drumming softly with his fingers on the volume in the bosom of
his blouse.

"I didn't intend to speak of this to a living soul," he went on,
motioning me not to answer him; "but something took hold of me to-night
and made me follow you up here. Perhaps, if I told you all, you would be
the more willing to look after the little book in case it goes ill with
me. When the war broke out I was teaching school down in Maine, in the
same village where my father was schoolmaster before me. The old man
when he died left me quite alone. I lived pretty much by myself, having
no interests outside of the district school, which seemed in a manner my
personal property. Eight years ago last spring a new pupil was brought
to the school, a slight slip of a girl, with a sad kind of face and
quiet ways. Perhaps it was because she wasn't very strong, and perhaps
because she wasn't used over well by those who had charge of her, or
perhaps it was because my life was lonely, that my heart warmed to the
child. It all seems like a dream now, since that April morning when
little Mary stood in front of my desk with her pretty eyes looking down