My story ends here. We never could trace her, though no effort was left untried. I confess that this is one, though almost hopeless. Yet I thought that some chance reader might be able to finish the story for me.
Whether Joe fell in his country's service or yet lives in some "little house" for Ellen, or whether she has found a longer, surer rest, in a house made ready for her long ago by other hands than his, I may never know; but I am sure, that, living or dead, He who is loving and over all has the poor "natural" in His tenderest keeping, and that some day she will go home to Him and to Joe.
As September drew to an end, with only here and there a suggestion of autumn in chrome-colored leaves on the ends of birch-branches, we were told that any day might suddenly bring forth winter. I remember, that, five years before, in precisely the same season, I had travelled from Upsala to Stockholm in a violent snow-storm, and therefore accepted the announcement as a part of the regular programme of the year. But the days came and went; fashionable equipages forsook their summer ground of the Islands, and crowded the Nevskoi Prospekt; the nights were cold and raw; the sun's lessening declination was visible from day to day, and still Winter delayed to make his appearance.
The Island drive was our favorite resort of an afternoon; and we continued to haunt it long after every summer guest had disappeared, and when the _datchas_ and palaces showed plank and matting in place of balcony and window. In the very heart of St. Petersburg the one full stream of the Nevada splits into three main arms, which afterwards subdivide, each seeking the Gulf of Finland at its own swift, wild will. The nearest of these islands, Vassili Ostrow, is a part of the solid city: on Kammenoi and Aptekarskoi you reach the commencement of gardens and groves; and beyond these the rapid waters mirror only palace, park, and summer theatre. The widening streams continually disclose the horizon-line of the Gulf; and at the farthest point of the drive, where the road turns sharply back again from the freedom of the shore into mixed woods of birch and pine, the shipping at Cronstadt--and sometimes the phantoms of fortresses--detach themselves from the watery haze, and the hill of Pargola, in Finland, rises to break the dreary level of the Ingrian marshes.