Beside a newly felled tree, in a glade starred with small white flowers, I came upon the bodies of a man and a boy, so hacked, so hewn, so robbed of all comeliness, that at the sight the heart stood still and the brain grew sick. Farther on was a clearing, and in its midst the charred and blackened walls of what had been a home. I crossed the freshly turned earth, and looked in at the cabin door with the stillness and the sunshine. A woman lay dead upon the floor, her outstretched hand clenched upon the foot of a cradle. I entered the room, and, looking within the cradle, found that the babe had not been spared. Taking up the little waxen body with the blood upon its innocent breast, I laid it within the mother’s arms, and went my way over the sunny doorstep and the earth that had been made ready for planting. A white butterfly — the first of