"You are a newspaper man still?" asked Ralston, after a momentary silence, as they walked on.
"Yes," said Leslie, "I am still at that drudgery, in my own way, and shall probably never be freed from it. But you see that I do not stick so closely to the desk as to injure my health very much! And you—excuse my asking the question," and he tried, walking at his side though he was, to mark closely whether the question produced any effect on the face of the other—"but the truth is, Ralston, that I scarcely expected to meet you in the North at the present moment. I thought you so incarnate a Southerner, as well as a slaveholder, that you would have been likely to join in the rebellion!"
"No, did you?" asked Ralston; and if his face changed, certainly Leslie, close observer as he thought himself, could not detect the difference. "Well, I must say that you put the matter plainly. You should have thought better of an old friend, and remembered that if I was a Virginian I was also and still more an American."
How openly and with what apparent honesty the man spoke! And how impossible it seemed that he could be uttering other words than those of entire truth? But Tom Leslie remembered the night under the arches of the Capitol, the stars-and-bars and the mystic circlet of the house on Prince Street, and the mysterious words that procured admission to the house up-town; and he had seen and heard enough of double faces not to be too sure of his ground on any man's word.
"Well, I am glad to know it," he said, in reply to Ralston's disclaimer. "We have not too many true Union men, who have forgotten the particular part of the Union in which they were born, for the sake of the country and the whole country. I am glad to know that you are one of them." He laid peculiar stress on the more important words of the last sentence, and bent his eyes still more searchingly on the countenance of the singular man before him.
"How long do you remain?" asked Ralston, as they neared the end of the bridge.
"A few days only," answered Leslie—"perhaps a week or two. I came up to catch the moon on the Falls."
"You should have come in time, then, and seen the eclipse," said the Virginian.
"Aha!" said Tom Leslie to himself. "One point of information gained, if no more! He is a little in the habit of being at Niagara, for he was here at the full moon in June and he has since been absent! One touch inside your armor, old fellow, if no more! You were here to see the eclipse, then?" he asked aloud of Ralston. "I tried to come myself, but could not manage it. What was it like, if you saw it over the Falls?"
"I was staying at the Clifton House, then," said Ralston, "and I came down to Table Rock, alone, just after midnight, and sat there from the beginning to the end of the obscuration. You should have seen"—and here his undeniable though repressed poetical temperament began to show itself in his cheek and eye—"you should have seen the dull, dismal shadow gradually creeping over the rapids as the disk grew smaller, every flashing wave seeming to be touched with a ghastly reflection that said: 'Daylight and moonlight are both gone forever—the last darkness is creeping on—the end of all things is at hand.' The spray below the cataract seemed dun and lead-colored, as if it might have been the sulphurous smoke rolling up from a battle-field. All was splendidly dismal, let me tell you!—such a spectacle as few men see and no man who sees ever forgets!"