He fought the good fight in the ranks, refusing the commission that had not, as he believed, the King’s seal.
I had no living elder brother. I hardly felt the loss while Junius lived. In 1855 he took a year’s leave of absence, and spent it in a German university. My father and myself were just setting out for Boston and the White Mountains, and accompanied him as far as New York. Junius and I were promenading the deck of the Potomac steamer when I showed him an ambrotype given me by “a friend whom I am sorry you have never met.”
He looked at it intently for a moment, and, in closing the case, searched my face with eyes at once smiling and piercing.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked, in the gentlest of tones.
I answered honestly: “No; there is nothing to tell. We are warm friends—no more.”
We were interrupted, and had no more opportunity for confidential chat until that evening, when we strolled from the hotel along the moonlighted streets to the Capitol. He alluded playfully, in a German letter, to the never-to-be-forgotten excursion—our last moonlit ramble, although we did not dream of it then—as “my walk with Corinne to the Capitol.”
(Men took time and pains to say graceful things, then-a-days!)
He told me that night—what he had already written in brief in a late letter—of his betrothal, of his happiness, and his ambition to make the best of himself for the dear sake of the woman who was waiting for him in the college town engirdled by the blue Virginian mountains.
The next day but one he sailed. My father and myself bade him “God-speed!” I was glad it so happened.