blessed them, and will love you for having loved them; flowers that have
thoughts like yours, and lives like yours, and which, once saved, you
save for ever? Is this only a little power? Far among the moorlands and
the rocks, far in the darkness of the terrible streets, these feeble
florets are lying, with all their fresh leaves torn and their stems
broken; will you never go down to them, nor set them in order in their
little fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trembling, from the
fierce wind?"

Engrossed with the voice, Hazel has been walking on, little heeding
whither she goes, when, as its tones die away, a groan startles her. How
terrible its sound; how incongruous, interrupting the soft harmonious
chorus of the soaring, singing birds! So painfully near it seemed, too,
it could but have been a very little distance off outside that gate
which she sees before her. Her first impulse is to draw back and retire,
shuddering, far into the garden. But, behold! the gate swings back of
its own accord, and in the face of that fact, and with the remembrance
of the words she has heard, she dare not do other than pass through the
open way.

What a strange, wide world, and how dreary! A great, mad battle is
raging; the grass, sloping up to the horizon, is scorched with the heat
of the sun--the sun which only made a pleasant warmth in the shady
garden. There is the fierce galloping of horses, and wrestling and
fighting of men. Shouts and groans fill the air and drown the song of
the birds. There are heaps of dying and wounded. Ah! there is one man
not a stone's throw from her; his must have been the voice that reached
her within her gates. How remarkable that she should have heard nothing
before of all the great din. Another groan, followed by some inaudible
words, causes Hazel timidly to approach the wounded man. He is evidently