By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.
There honor comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay
And freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there.—Collins.
It was not until the morning succeeding his arrival, after breakfast, when they found themselves alone together in the drawing-room, that Justin told Erminie the story of his voyage and shipwreck, his preservation and residence on the Desert Island, and his rescue and return home.
She listened with breathless interest to his narrative, and when it was finished she earnestly thanked Heaven for his restoration to his home and friends.
And then, in return, she gave him the history of all that had occurred to her since he had first sailed.
She told him of those gathering clouds of disaffection in the South that no one could be made to believe would ever break in a storm of Civil War. She spoke of that solemn day in the Senate when the Southern senators withdrew. She whispered of the shameful, sorrowful day when Fort Sumter was taken, and, in the language of the man who commanded the assault, “The proud flag that had never been humbled before—the star-spangled banner—was humbled to the dust.” She told how these words had burned in the hearts of all true patriots until they lighted a flame of love of country, hate of traitors, never to be quenched; how, at the President’s call for seventy-five thousand men, four times that number started to arms; how even across the broad Atlantic, in Ireland, the warm-hearted lovers of the Union had banded together and offered their services to the Federal Government through our ministers and consuls abroad; how these had been declined en masse, as unneeded then.