I must tell you of the Major's Last Love. I had thought I would leave
it in my note book, but a letter, which I can only read through a mist
of tears, has changed my mind.

Strolling out as the sun was setting, on the first evening of my stay
at a village hotel last summer, I saw two shadows cast across the
street; one so very long, and one so very short, as to look ridiculous.
They were the shadows of the Major and his Last Love. The Major,
hatless, was swinging musingly the torn straw hat of his love, while
the little three-year-old lady herself was struggling along with the
Major's hat piled with flowers and toys and teacups on her return from
having "a party" on the river edge. The little feet stumbled, the party
crockery flew, and the two shadows melted in one as the prattling owner
and the tall Major knelt together to gather them up. That was my first
sight of the Major and his love.

I cannot say that any of us knew, or came to know, all about the Major;
always excepting that we loved him. He was tall, straight, and
frost-haired. His regular features were of that sort that might have
belonged to a man of forty-five or a man of sixty, and he was a
changeable sort of a person who one day would look one age and the
next another. Of his means, we knew absolutely nothing. It was said
that his wealth had been carried away by the civil war and that he was
living on a small but sufficient remainder, which was doubtless true.
Over his gray moustache there was a blue eye that sometimes looked as
it might belong to a boy of eighteen and sometimes had the weary look
of a man long acquainted with grief. His skin was as soft as a woman's
and often suffused with a faint blush which would have better become
a woman. He was the very spirit of gentleness to both men and women,