despair or fate. Tiltock was strutting about below stairs with a
drunken old doctor, misnamed a surgeon, who deposited behind the bar a
rusty case of surgical instruments, and who took a deep potation to
the toast of "The fawchuns of waw." The Bladensburg people were well
aware of the occasion, and the old tavern was surrounded by loafers
and gossips, many of whom were boys who had walked out from the city
as we go to prize-fights in our day. To fill up the time a dog-fight
and a chicken-fight were improvised by the enterprising stable-boys in
the back yard, on the green slopes of the running Branch. While
Tiltock strutted out of town at an imposing pace to examine "The
Field," Robert Utie retired to his room, sought with an emetic to
relieve his stomach, and then sat down to write some letters and an
epitaph. The paper was thin, and the pen and ink matched it, but the
drunken boy's eyes marred more than all; for suddenly the secret
fountains of his lost youth were touched as by the prick of his pen,
and the drops gushed out upon the two words he had written:

"Dear mother--"

Not his sweetheart, who was nothing to him now; not his "honor," which
had been only vain-glory and deceit; not any thing but this earliest,
everlasting faith which is ours forever, whether we be steadfast or go
astray: the tie of home, of childhood, and of our mother's prayer and
kiss--this was the soft reproach which glided between a wasted youth
and the "field of valor" he had tempted. He wept. He sobbed. He threw
himself upon the bed, and pressing his temples into the ragged quilt,
felt the panorama of childhood pass across his mind like something
cool, sorrowful, and compassionate. The sickness _she_ had cured, the
bad words _she_ had taken from his undutiful lips, the whipping she
had saved him from at the cost of her deceit, the lie she had never