Saxe Holm's Stories, Second Series. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson

and ran over Karl, and he could not stir. The sun went down; the twilight deepened into darkness. The last boat had gone; in an agony almost maddening Karl lay listening for the oars, and trying to persuade himself that it was not yet too late for one more boat to come back.

      A cold wind blew off the water; he had nothing over him but a bit of ragged carpet; under his head an old army coat rolled up for a pillow.

      A rebel soldier came by and tried to take this away. Karl spoke no word, but lifted his eyes and looked him full in the face. The man dropped his hold of the overcoat, and walked away. Eight o'clock—nine—ten, no sound on the deserted wharf except the dull thud of the waves against its bides, and the occasional splash of a fierce rat, swimming away. But Karl heard nothing. He had swooned. The fatigue of the trip, the exposure to ​the air, the long day without food, and still more the utter loss of hope, had drained his last strength. However, in after days, recalling this terrible night, he always said, "I not once my four leaf of clover forget. I say to myself, it is the luck to go to Heaven that it have bring me; and yet all the time, I know in my heart that I am not to die; that I have luck in the over world yet."

      Karl was right. By one of those inexplicable but uncontrollable impulses, on which the life and the death of man have so often hung, the young officer, who had had charge of moving the prisoners from the wharf to the transport, was led to return once more to make sure that no man had been left behind.

      Karl was not the only one. There were two others who had been laid, as he was, in the shade, and out of sight, and who had been too weak to call for help. It was nearly midnight when these three unconscious and apparently dying men were carried on board the ship. The other two soon revived, but Karl knew nothing until he had been for two days tenderly nursed in one of the Philadelphia hospitals. Even then he had only a half consciousness of himself, or his surroundings. Fever had set in; he was delirious a great part of the time, for two months; and when he was not, his broken English, and his frequent reference to the "four leaf of clover," prevented the nurses from believing him fully sane.

      ​At last one blessed Sunday, there came to the hospital a young lady who spoke German. At the first sound of the broken syllables, she went quickly to his bedside, and saying to the nurse, "I can speak to this poor fellow in his own language;" she said a few words to Karl in German. The effect was magical.

      He lifted himself up suddenly in bed, and exclaiming "Ach mein Gott," poured out such a flood of incoherent, grateful, bewildered German that the best of scholars need not have been ashamed at failing to comprehend him. Karl had found a friend. Every day she went to see him—carried him the food he needed, found out from him the names of his friends, and wrote letters to them in German.

      One day he said to her: "You cannot be my girl of the four leaf of clover. You have eyes like the heaven, like mine; but her eyes were like eyes of a deer that is afraid."

      Then he told the story of the clover, and showed her the creased and faded leaf.

      It seemed almost a miracle that the fragile, crumbling little thing should not have been lost to all these months. But no Roman Catholic devotee ever clung more superstitiously to a relic than did Karl Reutner to his "four leaf of clover."

      Often in his delirious attacks he would call for it, and not be pacified until the nurses, who had learnt to humor the whim, would put the paper ​into his hand. Now that he was better, he kept it carefully in the inner compartment of his pocket-book, and rarely took it out. It was enough to look in and see that it was safe.

      Karl's only relatives in this country were a brother and sister who lived in Chicago. The brother was a manufacturer of fringes, buttons, and small trimmings, and the sister had married an engraver, also a German. They were industrious working-people, preserving in their new homes all the simple-hearted ways of their life in the old world. When Karl was drafted for the war, they had tried in vain to induce him to let them put their little savings together to buy a substitute for him. "No, no, I will not have it," he said; "my life is no more than another man's life that it should be saved. There are brothers and sisters to all. I have no wife; it is the men without wives that must go to fight." On these two simple house holds the news from Gettysburg fell with crushing weight.

      "Karl Reutner, killed;" only three words, and there were long columns of names with the same bitter word following them. But into few houses was carried greater sorrow than into these. Wilheim Reutner and Karl were twins. From their babyhood they had never been separated, had never disagreed. Together they had come to the new world to seek their fortunes; together they had slowly built up the business which their father had ​followed in Berlin; they lived together; and Wilhelm's babies knew no difference in love and care between their uncle Karl and their father. The sister was much younger; Wilhelm and Karl had laid by their first earnings to bring her out to join them, and for some years they had all lived in one family in such peace and happiness as are not often seen among laboring people of American birth. No thought of discontent, no dream of ambition for a higher position, entered their heads. Home love, comfort, industry, and honesty—these were the watchwords of their lives, the key-notes of all their actions. When Wilhelm and Annette were married, there was no change in this atmosphere of content and industry, except an immeasurable increase of happiness as child after child came, bringing the ineffable sunshine of babyhood into the two households.

      Just before the sad news of Karl's death, a new and very great element of enjoyment had been introduced into Wilhelm's family. Margaret Warren had come to live in his house.

      Margaret Warren was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. Her life had been passed in small country villages in the Western States. She had known privations, hardships, discomforts of all sorts; her father was a gentleman and a scholar, and wretchedly out of place in the pioneer western life; he did not understand the people; the people misinterpreted him; his heart was full of love for ​their souls, and a burning desire to bring them to Christ; but he wounded their self love, and they offended his instincts, at every step; the consequence was, that he found himself at a middle age with an invalid wife and six children, a disappointed, unsuccessful man. Margaret was the eldest daughter, and for the first fourteen years of her life, her father's constant companion. The only unalloyed pleasure he had was in the careful training of her mind. Margaret Warren was, at sixteen, a rare girl; she was far better fitted than most boys are, to enter college. But all this learning did not in the least unfit her for practical duties. She was her mother's stay as well as her father s delight; she understood housekeeping as well as she did Greek, and found as true a pleasure in contriving how to make a garment out of slender material, as in demonstrating a problem in Euclid. Until her seventeenth year she had been unflaggingly brave, hopeful, content, in this hard life. But as she saw the years slowly making all the burdens heavier her mother growing feebler, the family growing larger, she began to ask herself what the end would be; and she found no answer to the question. A vague feeling, that she herself ought to find some way of making her mother and her five little brothers and sisters more comfortable, haunted her thoughts by night and day. She saw the secret of her father's failure more clearly than the most discontented of his parishioners ever saw it. She ​knew things could never be any better. Oh, why did papa ever undertake to preach," she said to herself, over and over; her affectionate reverence for him made her feel guilty in the thought. Yet it pressed upon her more and more heavily.

      "Each place we go to is a little poorer than the one before it," she repeated, "and yet, each year we need a little more money instead of less; and mamma is growing weaker and more tired every day. If I could only get a good school I could earn as much money as papa does by preaching. I know I could teach well; and then I could learn too." Unconsciously to herself, the desire for a wider knowledge and experience of life entered largely into Margaret s desire to be a teacher. She had uncommon executive ability, and, without knowing it, was beginning to be cramped by her limited sphere.

      Through the help of a clergyman in Chicago, an old class-mate of Mr. Warren's, Margaret realized her dream. It was a bitter day for the little household in the parsonage when she left them. With tears streaming down their cheeks the children clung to her, and her mother was pale and speech less with grief; but Margaret bravely kept back all traces of her own sorrow, and went away with a smiling face. The next day she wrote to her mother:—

      "Dear,