"It is here—here now—even with you present, I feel her hand on mine; the clasp is tight and tender, and she will never leave me, but with life!"
And then this once gay, strong, and gallant fellow, now the wreck of himself in body and in spirit, sank forward with his head between his knees, sobbing and faint.
Four months afterwards, when with my friends, I was shooting bears at Hammerfest, I read in tell Norwegian Aftenposten, that Carl Holberg had shot himself in bed, on Christmas Eve.
THE BOMBARDIER'S STORY.
"Some feel by instinct swift as light
The presence of the foe,
Whom God ordains in future time
To strike the fatal blow." AYTOUN.
Very few persons in this world are unlucky enough to see, or to have seen, a ghost; but we nearly have all met with some one else who had seen something weird or unearthly. And now for a little story of my own, by which you will find that, in my time, I have more than once encountered a ghost, or that which, perhaps, was worse than any ghost could be.
In the Christmas before the battle of the Alma, I, Bob Twyford, was a young bombardier of the Royal Artillery, a "G.C.R." (good conduct ring) man, mighty proud of that, and of my uniform, with its yellow lace and rows of brass buttons, with the motto "Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt," and so forth, when I went home on a month's furlough, to see old mother and all my friends at our little village in the Weald of Kent.
I was proud too, to show them that, by the single chevron of bombardier, my foot was firmly planted on the first step of the long ladder of promotion; happy, too, that there was one in particular to show it to—my cousin, little Bessie Leybourne—though she was a big Bessie now—my sweetheart, and my wife that was to be, if good promotion came, or if I bought my discharge, and took to business with some money we expected—money that was long, long in coming.
More than once, in the beautiful season of autumn, had Bessie Leybourne been the queen of the hop-pickers, and then I thought that she looked bright and beautiful as a fairy, when the crown of flowers was placed on her sunny brown hair, and her deep blue eyes were beaming with pleasure and gratified vanity.