It haunted him. She was dying.
He applied for a furlough; but furloughs were hard to get then
and he could not hear from it; and when a letter came in his mother's name
in a lady's hand which he did not know, telling him of his mother's
poverty and sickness and asking him if he could get off to come and see her,
it seemed to him that she was dying, and he did not wait for the furlough.
He was only a few days' march from home and he felt that he could see her
and get back before he was wanted. So one day he set out in the rain.
It was a scene of desolation that he passed through, for the country was
the seat of war; fences were gone, woods burnt, and fields cut up and bare;
and it rained all the time. A little before morning, on the night
of the third day, he reached the edge of the district and plunged into
its well-known pines, and just as day broke he entered the old path
which led up the little hill to his mother's cabin. All during his journey
he had been picturing the meeting with some one else besides his mother,
and if Vashti had stood before him as he crossed the old log he would hardly
have been surprised. Now, however, he had other thoughts;
as he reached the old clearing he was surprised to find it grown up
in small pines already almost as high as his head, and tall weeds
filled the rows among the old peach-trees and grew up to the very door.
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