Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/178

 j^o INTRODUCTION

mass of the nation, he yet deemed the Union so important that he was wilHng to yield up his Hfe for it. I urged him to finish his college studies, but he was resolved to go. When I calculated the risk, he said that most men were in search of an honorable death. When I could not restrain him, I gave him what encouragement I could, but I regret that I did not insist on his wearing a bullet-proof vest.

The Stanley now dead is not precisely the Stanley whom you remember when you went away, nor was he now what he promised to be ten years hence. You will remember when he was my dear little pet of nine years old, and when he used to sit astride on my knees, and gleefully he would enter upon the occupation of rubbing noses, and how amiably he would endure the playful whippings you gave him when we lay three in a bed in the upper front chamber ; and you remember him later when, misliking the prospects of his life, he seemed for a time to have lost all happiness. He told me afterwards that he had lived miserably for two whole years. After this time a new life began. We strolled together almost a whole week before he went to Exeter, and he expressed delight at the prospect of going to college ; and from this time my later intimacy with him began.

A boating affair at Stow, where he was near being drowned, yet would not alarm me, disclosed to nic his generosity and to him the intensity of my anxiety for him. As we went home clasping each other mid thunder and lightning, drenched with rain and in the deepest dark- ness, delighting to perceive I loved him, he would try me yet further, wantonly exclaiming that I should not probably have him long, for he was apt to stumble into danger ; and it vexed me not that he would make himself dear to me as possible. A little while before, thinking he meant to in-

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