THREE:I saw the Harpers only twice again before the war was over. Nearly all winter our soldiering was down in the Felicianas, but by February we were once more at Big Black when Sherman with ten thousand of his destroyers swarmed out of Vicksburg on his great raid to Meridian. Three or four mounted brigades were all that we could gather, and when we had fought our fiercest we had only fought the tide with a broom; it went back when it was ready, a month later, leaving what a wake! The Harpers set up a pretty home in Jackson, where both Harry and Gholson were occasional visitors, on errands more or less real to department headquarters in that State capital; yet Harry and Ccile did not wed until after the surrender. Gholson's passion far Charlotte really did half destroy him, while it lasted; nevertheless, one day about a year after her marriage, when I had the joy of visiting the Harpers, I saw that Gholson's heart was healed of that wound and had opened in a new place. That is why Estelle, with that danger-glow of emotion ever impending on her beautiful cheek, never married. She was of that kind whose love, once placed, can never remove itself, and she loved Gholson. Both Ccile and Camille had some gift to discern character, and some notion of their own value, and therefore are less to be excused for not choosing better husbands than they did; but Estelle could never see beyond the outer label of man, woman or child, and Gholson's label was his piety. She believed in it as implicitly, as consumingly, as he believed in it himself; and when her whole kindred spoke as one and said no, and she sent him away, she knew she was a lifelong widow from that hour. Gholson found a wife, a rich widow ten years his senior, and so first of all, since we have reached the page for partings, good-bye Gholson. "Whom the gods love die young"--you must be sixty years old now, for they say you're still alive. And good-bye, old Dismukes; the Colonel made a fortune after the war, as a penitentiary lessee, but they say he has--how shall we phrase it?--gone to his reward? Let us hope not."As you have observed, the Buddhist temples contain the statue of Buddha, while the Shinto temples have nothing of the sort. For all practical purposes, you may compare a Buddhist temple to a Catholic church, with its statues and pictures of the saints; and a Shinto temple to a Protestant church, with its bare walls, and its altar with no ornament of consequence. The Buddhists, like the Catholics, burn a great deal of incense in front of their altars and before their statues; but the Shintoists do not regard the burning of incense as at all necessary to salvation. Both religions have an excellent code of morals; and if all the adherents of either should do as they are told by their sacred teachers, there would not be much wickedness in the country. As for that matter, there is enough of moral precept in nearly every religion in the world to live by, but the trouble is that the whole world will not live as it should. Buddhism is more than five hundred years older than Christianity. The old forms of Shintoism existed before Buddhism was brought to Japan; but the modern is so much changed from the old that it is virtually, as I told you, a reformation of Buddhism. At all events, that was the form which it assumed at the time the Shogoon's government was overthrown.
FORE:"Whose husband I have killed.... Ah, God!... Ah, my God! why was I chosen to do that?... And you think, Dick, it was not a question of time; that I did not ask, maybe a little too soon?"Poor parson knows kind friends are thinking{205} for him, he said. He knows it too well perhaps: he is so selfish that he leaves his happiness in the hands of others, and doesnt bother about it himself.
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