For three years or the war! It went to my heart, that
requisition. It looked so terribly in earnest. And so
unhopeful. I wondered, those days, how people could live that
did not know how to pray; when every one had, or might have, a
treasure at stake in this fierce game that was playing. I have
often since felt the same wonder.
I do not know how studies and the usual forms of school
recitations went on; but they did go on; smoothly, I suppose.
I even recollect that mine went on successfully. With my
double or treble motive for desiring success, I had also a
reason for prizing and remembering the attainment. But my head
was on graver matters, all the time. Would the rebels attack,
Washington? it was constantly threatened. Would fighting
actually become the common news of the land? The answer to
this second query began to be sounded audibly. It was before
May was over, that Ellsworth's soldiers took possession of
Alexandria, and he was killed. That stirred people at the
time; it looks a very little thing now. Alexandria! how I
remembered driving through it one grey morning, on one of my
Southern journeys; the dull little place, that looked as if it
had fallen asleep some hundred or two years ago and never
waked up. Now it was waked up with rifle shots; but its slave
pen was emptied. I was glad of that. And Thorold was safe in
Washington, drilling raw soldiers, in the saddle all day, and
very happy, he wrote me. I had begun to be uneasy about his
writing to me. It was without leave from my father and mother,
and the leave I knew could not be obtained; it would follow
that the indulgence must be given up. I knew it must. I looked
that necessity in the face. A correspondence, such a
correspondence, carried on without their knowing of it, must
be an impossibility for me. I intended to tell Christian so,
and stop the letters, before I should go abroad. My
difficulties were becoming daily more and more clear, and
looking more and more unmanageable. I wondered sometimes
whither I was drifting; for guide or choose my course I could
not. I had got into the current by no agency and with no fault
of my own. To get out of the current - perhaps that might not
be till life and I should go out together. So I was a somewhat
sober and diligent student those closing weeks of the term;
and yet, very happy, for Christian loved me. It was a new,
sweet, strange, elixir of life.