The Monitor. [volume] (Woodstown, N.J.) 1884-1892, 1890-05-30


earned the name Of heroes. Bull Run
was a great and impressive lesson to
Darrell as well as to the whole north.
The notifying repulse and disgracefui
panic was Of immeasurable benefit TO the
federals IN tie end. Darrell was deeply
chagrined that he had not been wounded,
buthe was without a scratch, beyond the
bruises inflicted by the fugitive masses
in their mad ace for Washington. He
soon reflected that there was still time
for wounds; but he had no idea of the
slaughter of the next four years, which
turned the nation into a ommon house
of mourning.
Bull Run had made a soldier of him;
had increased his horror of aught APP
preaching cowardiee; had taught him
the priceless lesson of the need of cool
ness under any and all circumstances.
Bull Run was to him, as indeed it was to
every free state, a kind of military edu-
cation, and was duly profited by.
As may be supposed, Helen and OAR
rell corresponded, and their letters were
very much, no doubt, like those the ma
Jerity of young men and women write
who are in love with one another. The
correspondence may have been more ro-
mantle, for their environment was more
romantic and their emotion quickened
with uncertainty and peril. She was, for
the first few months, in constant fear
that every newspaper she took up would
inform her of his death. But, as the
time heightened, and as he passed
through battle after battle unframed,
her terrors diminished, though her anxi-
cites continued.
She became, as men become who are
habitually exposed TO danger, a kind Of
f~atalist, without any process Of reason
ing. She wrote, Don after the battle of
Bull Run, that Clarence Williams had
again proposed to her, encouraged, as she
believed, by her father to renew his suit.
His second rejection had apparently as
tonished him more than the first, and
had so visibly excited his anger that she
was forced to the conclusion that he
wanted, unaccountable as such motive
seems, to marry her from something like
malice. The next month he sailed for
Europe, to be absent Indefinitely, and her
father upbraided her for what he pro-
nounced her extreme folly in once more
declining a rich, handsome, well con-
neeted fellow, whom most of the girls in
her set would be oyerjoyed to get
Months and seasons passed, very, very
slowly, for the horrors Of the civil war
seemed to stretch out time immeasurably.
Darrell had taken active part in most Of
the engagements in Virginia, serving
under Mcclellan, Burnside, Hooker,
Meade, and finally Grant. He had gone
unscathed through the bloody battles of
the Wilderness, and in the summer of
1864 vas sent with his regiment, which
he now commanded as colonel, to be-
siege Petersburg. He had been greatly
opposed to asking for leave Of absence,
but had several times, during lulls Of
active hostility, seen, with increased love,
his b~etrothed, who had gone on to Wash
ington under chaperonage of a maiden
aunt. Helen had been anxious to serve
as a voluntary nurse in the hospitals of
that capital, but her father, who WA not
very well, had persuaded her that he
needed her care at home. The lovers
had often been tempted to marry CLAN
d~estinely, but they had resisted the
temptation, even when she had, in de-
spairing mood, a horrible presentiment
that he would die in the field.
Remember, my darling" he would
say, in mock heroic tone, ssthat it is
written in the stars that our matrimo-
NAL wal shall begin after the nations
peace."