When I came again, my merry friend had been returned to his regiment, and that had been our final interview. I have often wondered since, how (if ever) we should meet again? Whether that last laughing parting will linger in his mind, or whether its memory shall have been crushed out by the stern realities of war?
Note.—The problem has been solved. To our amazement, the week after the Gettysburg fight, Little Corning walked into the ladies’ room at the hospital, fresh from the field—or rather, anything but fresh. Tattered and battered, soiled and moiled; his head tied up, and looking very much, on the whole, as though he had been in an Irish row. He had been wounded in the temple by a shell; but not dangerously, and had hastened to “his old home,” as he called it, as soon as he arrived, although to his great regret, as well as ours, he had been placed in another hospital.
We welcomed him warmly, and were too full of his danger and our own—his escape and our own, to revert to past days for more than a word. He had not lost his old bright spirit, and when we told him how pleasant it was to have our old friends for our defenders, his eye sparkled, and he said, “Yes; I felt all the time I was fighting for you.” And thus we met again.
“No stream from its source
Flows seaward, how lonely soever its course,
But what some land is gladdened. No star ever rose
And set, without influence somewhere. Who knows