When Philip awoke, after having swooned at the feet of his comrades when his rescue was accomplished, he lay in the delicious warmth of his bunk. The late afternoon sun streamed in at the window over his head, and Coleman sat watching at his side. Bromley was stirring the fire, which was burning briskly on the hearth, and the smell of gruel was in the room. The station flags and the crossed sabers brightened the space above the chimneypiece. The map hung on the opposite wall, and over it the old flag with thirty-five stars seemed to have been draped just where it would first catch his waking eye.

Strangely enough, the immediate cause that awoke Philip was a dull boom which made the faces of his comrades turn pale, and which was no less than the fall of the avalanche on which he had passed the night and the best part of the day before.

Philip, if he heard the sound at all, was not sufficiently awake at the time to understand its awful meaning; and without noticing the pallor of his comrades, he weakly put out his hand, which Coleman took in his own with a warm pressure, and Bromley came over to the side of the bunk and looked doubtingly into his face. Neither of his comrades uttered a word.

"Give me the gruel," said Philip; "I was never so hungry before. And don\'t look at me so, George; I\'m not mad."

After he had eaten, he talked so rationally that Coleman and Bromley shook each other\'s hands and laughed immoderately at every slightest excuse for merriment, but said not a word of the delusion which had so lately darkened Philip\'s mind. They were so very jolly that Philip laughed weakly himself by infection, and then he asked them to tell him how he had fallen over the mountain without knowing it.

In reply to this question, Coleman told him that he had been sick, and that he must have walked off the great rock in the thick fog.

Philip was silent for a space, as if trying to digest this strange information, and then with some animation he said:

"Look here, Fred! The funniest part of this whole dark business was when I had climbed up to the top of the great bank. There, alongside a hole in the snow, lay our telescope. When I put out my hand to take it, it rolled away through the opening in the snow; and the Lord forgive me, fellows, I heard it ring on the rocks at the bottom of the Cove."

With this long speech, and without waiting for a reply, Philip fell off into a gentle doze.

Coleman and Bromley, having no doubt now that Philip\'s mind was restored, because he seemed to have no recollection of the princess or of his strange behavior on the mountain for the year that was past, were very happy at this change in his condition. As to the telescope, they regarded its fall as a very dangerous matter, and a catastrophe which might bring them some unwelcome visitors. But, then, it was possible that it had fallen among inaccessible rocks, and would never be found at all. If any one should come to disturb them, they might hear of some unpleasant facts of which they would rather remain in ignorance. Now that nearly five years had passed since the great war, they thought that whoever came would not exult over them in an unbearable way, or rub insults into their wounds. They knew that some of the mountaineers had been union men; and although they would never seek communication with them, a connection formed against their will might result to their advantage. They had a good supply of the double eagles left. Somebody held title to the mountain, they knew; and if the telescope did bring them visitors, they could buy the plateau from the deep gorge up, and pay in gold for it handsomely, too. Then they could send down their measures to a tailor and have new uniforms made to the buttons they had saved—that is, if the tailor was not a secessionist too hot-headed to soil his hands with the uniform of the old, mutilated, and disgraced union. Then, too, they could buy seeds and books and a great many comforts to make their lives more enjoyable on the mountain.

And so it came about that, when month after month passed and nobody came, the three soldiers were rather disappointed. They resolved to save what remained of their minted and milled coins against any unforeseen chance they might have to put them in circulation; and now that they thought of it, it would have been much wiser to have melted the coins of the United States and saved the English guineas. If, however, the world had not changed greatly since they left it, they believed the natives in the valley below would accept good red gold if the face of the old boy himself was stamped on the coin.

When Philip was quite himself again, by reason of his knowledge of milling he took entire control of the golden mill. In the cold weather his old overcoat was dusty with meal, as a miller\'s should be; and in the summer days plenty of the yellow dust clung to the hairs on his arms and in his thin red beard.

It is a Sunday morning in September again, and, to be exact with the date,—for it was a very important one in their history,—it is the fifth day of the month in the year \'70. The three soldiers are standing together by the door of the mill, dressed very much as we last saw them there, and engaged in an animated conversation.

"An egg," said Lieutenant Coleman, facing his two comrades, and crossing his hands unconsciously over the great "A" on the back of his canvas trousers, "as an article of food may be considered as the connecting-link between the animal and the vegetable. If we had to kill the hen to get the egg, I should consider it a sin to eat it. What we have to do, and that right briskly, is to eat the eggs to prevent the hens from increasing until they are numerous enough to devour every green thing on the mountain."

"I am not so sure of that," said Philip, toying with his one dusty suspender; "we could feed the eggs to the bear."

"We could, but we won\'t," said Bromley, shaking some crumbs from the front of his gown. "When nature prompts a hen to cackle, do you think we are expected to look the other way? Why, Philip, you will be going back on honey next because bees make it. We are vegetarians because we no longer think it right to destroy animal life. We not only think it wrong to destroy, but we believe it to be our duty to preserve it wherever we find it. Don\'t we spread corn on the snow in the winter for the coons and squirrels? Come, now! We are not vegetarians at all. We are simply unwilling to take life, which leaves us to choose between vegetable diet and starvation. Now, then," said Bromley, spreading out his bare arms and shrugging his shoulders, "of the two, I choose a vegetable diet; but if I could eat half a broiled chicken without injury to the bird, I\'d do it. That\'s the sort of vegetarian I am."

"Nonsense!" said Philip. "You\'re a dabster at splitting hairs, you are. It was uphill work making a vegetarian of you, George; but we have got you there at last, and you can\'t squirm out of it."

"Give it to him, Phil!" cried Coleman. "Hit him on the salt!"

"Exactly!" continued Philip, taking a swallow of water from a golden cup, and addressing himself to Bromley. "When the salt was gone you thought you\'d never enjoy another meal, didn\'t you?—and how is it now? You are honest enough to admit that you never knew what a keen razor-edge taste was before. I\'ll bet you a quart of double eagles, George, that you get more flavor out of a dish of common—"

At that moment a bag of sand came through the branches of the tree which shaded the three soldiers as they talked. There was a dark shadow moving over the sunlit ground, and a rushing sound in the air above. Their own conversation, and the noise of the water pouring from the trough over the idle wheel and splashing on the stones, must have prevented their hearing human voices close at hand. Rushing out from under the trees, they saw a huge balloon sweeping over their heads. The enormous bag of silk, swaying and pulsating in the meshes of the netting, was a hundred feet above the plateau; but the willow basket, in which two men and one woman were seated, was not more than half that distance from the ground. The surprise, the whistling of the monster through the air, the snapping and rending of the drag-rope with its iron hook, which was tearing up the turf, and which in an instant more scattered the shingles on the roof of their house like chaff, and carried off some of their bedding which was airing there—all these things were so startling, and came upon them so suddenly, that they had but short opportunity to observe the human beings who came so near them.

"RUSHING OUT FROM UNDER THE TREES, THEY SAW A HUGE BALLOON SWEEPING OVER THEIR HEADS."
"RUSHING OUT FROM UNDER THE TREES, THEY SAW
A HUGE BALLOON SWEEPING OVER THEIR HEADS."

Brief as the time was, the faces of the three strangers were indelibly impressed upon their memory, and no portion of their dress seen above the rim of the basket escaped their observation. The woman, who appeared to be perfectly calm and self-possessed, kissed her hand with a smile so enchanting, lighting a face which seemed to the soldiers to be a face of such angelic beauty, that they half doubted if she could really belong to the race of earthly women they had once known so intimately. The men were not in like manner attractive to their eyes, but seemed to be of that oily-haired, waxy-............