All at once we discovered that Aunt Em was standing a few yards away

from us, on the other side of the fence. We could see her from where we

sat by only turning a little--a motionless, stout, upright figure, with

a pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. She, too,

had her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was

full in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly,

straight ahead.

Suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. Turning, we saw that

a black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head,

had come up to where Aunt Em stood, and was at her shoulder. Marcellus

nudged me, and whispered, “It’s S’reny. Look out for squalls!” And then

we listened in silence.

“Won’t you speak to me at all, Emmeline?” we heard this new voice say.

Aunt Em’s face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never

moved. Her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes

on the barn.

“If there’s anything I’ve done, tell me,” pursued the other. “In such

an hour as this--when both our hearts are bleeding so, and--and every

breath we draw is like a curse upon us--it doesn’t seem a fit time

for us--for us to--” The voice faltered and broke, leaving the speech

unfinished.

Aunt Em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had

failed. Then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a

few ungracious words as it were over her shoulder. “If I had anything

special to say, most likely I’d say it,” she remarked.

We could hear the sigh that Serena drew. She lifted her shawled head,

and for a moment seemed as if about to turn. Then she changed her mind,

apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other.

“See here, Emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “Nobody in the

world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how

you have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and

your brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself

for them, day or night. I have said often to--to him who has gone--that

I didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted

woman than you, his sister. And--now that he is gone--and we are both

more sisters than ever in affliction--why in Heaven’s name should you

behave like this to me?”

Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. “I don’t know as I’ve done

anything to you,” she said in defence. “I’ve just let you alone, that’s

all. An’ that’s doin’ as I’d like to be done by.” Still she did not turn

her head, or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors.

“Don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white

hand upon Aunt Em’s shoulder. “That isn’t the way we two ought to stand

to each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before.

Can’t it be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day,

on our way up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep

sympathy for you, and--”

Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. “Yes, ’n’ what did _he_ say? Come, don’t

make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?” She shook off the hand

on her shoulder as she spoke.

Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and

rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so

that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons

of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my

mother’s “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and

began stammering, “Well, he said--Let’s see--he said--”

“Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough

what he said! He said I was a good worker--that they’d never had to

have a hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they

wouldn’t known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on

an’ off for twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that

he went down South to bring back _your_ husband, an’ that he never so

much as give a thought to fetchin’ _my_ husband, who was just as good a

soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know--did he

tell you that?”

What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before

this bitter gale of words?

“An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice

mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with

the soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that--did he say,

‘This is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together,

an’ was killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say

that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he

didn’t!”

Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a

way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame _me?_” she

asked.

Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to

intoxicate her. “No!” she shouted. “It’s like the Bible. One was taken

an’ the other left. It was always Alvy this, an’ Alvy that, nothin’

for any one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he

deserved it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he

was livin’. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man’s dead,

he’s pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would

think. But it ain’t so. One man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’

there’s a hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’

bringin’ him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d

stand by itself. The _other_ man--he can lay where he fell! Them that’s

lookin’ for the first one are right close by--it ain’t more’n a few

miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me,

an’ he was all over the ground two years ago--but nobody looks for this

other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They

ain’t no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’

_him!_ No--_he_ could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when

the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain’t no

funeral for him--no bells tolled--unless it may be a cowbell up in the

pasture that he hammered out himself. An’ _his_ widow can go around,

week days an’ Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever mentions

the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to put on

black. I s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some mournin’

I’d buy _candy_ with it instead!”

With this climax of flaming sarcasm Aunt Em stopped, her eyes aglow, her

thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. She had never talked

so much or so fast before in her life. She swung the empty tin-pail now

defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with

excitement. Every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again.

Serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms

stiff and straight by her side. Her chin seemed to have grown longer

or to be thrust forward more. When she spoke it was in a colder

voice--almost mincing in the way it cut off the words.

“All this is not my doing,” she said. “I am to blame for nothing of it.

As I tried to tell you, I sympathize deeply with your grief. But grief

ought to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle

and soften their hearts. I shall trouble you with no more offers of

friendship. I--I think I will go back to the house now--to my little

girl.”

Even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a

shrill, creaking noise which we all knew. At the sound Marcellus and I

stood up, and Serena forgot her intention to go away. The barn doors,

yelping as they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open.

IV

The first one to emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to

make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came running

toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he

advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. It was apparent that something

out of the ordinary had happened.

We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to

a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations,

accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus

could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em,

strangely enough, seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling,

and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent

scrutiny upon Hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with

encouraging exclamations, “He did, eh!”

“Is that so?” and “I expected as much.” Listening and watching, I formed

the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi

at all, but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow

Serena’s feelings.

Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her

sister-in-law, and remarked, “P’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s

say-in’?”

“Not a word!” said Serena, eagerly. “Tell me, please, Emmeline!”

Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. “He was shot through the mouth at Gaines’s

Mills, you know--that’s right near Cold Harbor and--the Wilderness,” she

said, obviously making talk.

“That isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in Serena. “What _is_ it,

Emmeline?”

“Well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to

know--he says that it ain’t Alvy at all that they’ve got there in the

barn.”

Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.

“He says it’s some strange man,” continued Em, “a yaller-headed man, all

packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him.

Who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t Alvy.”

“They’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old Arphaxed, shaking

his long gray beard with wrath.

He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our

absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind

him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried

across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly

deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. It was a relief to

hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.

“They ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of

passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “I paid ’em

what they asked--they took a hundred dollars o’ my money--an’ they

ain’t sent me _him_ at all! There I went, at my age, all through the

Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up from

a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin’ for the box at New York an’

Albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this

very day--an’ here it ain’t _him_ at all! I’ll have the law on ‘em

though, if it costs the last cent I’ve got in the world!”

Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly

broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic

silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough

still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man;

we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this

terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it,

in a rage with everything and everybody.

“If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought

to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too,

if you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.”

“Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with

a snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars--I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a

thousand--if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em their own

figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n double, I’d

’a’ paid it. What _I_ wanted was _my boy!_ It ain’t so much their

cheatin’ _me_ I mind, either, if it ’d be’n about anything else. But

to think of Alvy--_my boy_--after all the trouble I took, an’ the

journey, an’ my sickness there among strangers--to think that after it

all he’s buried down there, no one knows where, p’raps in some trench

with private soldiers, shovelled in anyhow--oh-h! they ought to be

hung!”

The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt

Em lifted her head at this.

“If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she

said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. On

Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be called

fust an’ given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried a

musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore

swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best

man that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.”

Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise

and some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him

think better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling

exclamations to his auditors at large.

“Makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “There was that

funeral to-day--with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now

it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t Alvy at all I brought back

with me, but only some perfect stranger--by what you can make out from

his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the war’s a jedgment

on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’

of honest men! They wa’n’t no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor

anyway--everybody admits that! It was murder an’ massacre in cold

blood--fifty thousand men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! An’ then

not even to git my boy’s dead body back! I say hangin’s too good for

’em!”

“Yes, father,” said Myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you

said about the--the box? Wouldn’t it look better--”

“_No!_” shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. “Let Dana do what I told

him--take it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury

it where he likes. It’s no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There

won’t be no funeral held here!”

It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not

seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped

as he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying

his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken,

but she held up her hand.

“Yes, I heard it all,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement.

“I am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of

learning--our mistake--and it gives me the chance now to say something

which I--I feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you say,

a private soldier. Well, isn’t this a good time to remember that there

was a private soldier who went out from this farm--belonging right

to this family--and who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as

General Sedgwick or General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva, or any one

else? I never met Emmeline’s husband, but Alva liked him, and spoke

to me often of him. Men who fall in the ranks don’t get identified, or

brought home, but they deserve funerals as much as the others--just

as much. Now, this is my idea: let us feel that the mistake which has

brought this poor stranger to us is God’s way of giving us a chance to

remember and do honor to Abel Jones. Let him be buried in the family

lot up yonder, where we had thought to lay Alva, and let us do it

reverently, in the name of Emmeline’s husband, and of all others who

have fought and died for our country, and with sympathy in our hearts

for the women who, somewhere in the North, are mourning, just as we

mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn.”

Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the

moisture gathering in his old eyes. “I could e’en a’most ’a’ thought

it was Alvy talkin’,” was what he said. Then he turned abruptly, but we

all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was to

be done.

The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly

off toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A

minute of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt

Em’s side, and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This

time it was not shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by

little, until its palm rested against Aunt Em’s further cheek. We heard

the tin-pail fall resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence,

and there was a confused movement as if the two women were somehow

melting into one.

“Come on, Sid!” said Marcellus Jones to me; “let’s start them cows

along. If there’s anything I hate to see it’s women cryin’ on each

other’s necks.”

THE EVE OF THE FOURTH

It was well on toward evening before this Third of July all at once

made itself gloriously different from other days in my mind.

There was a very long afternoon, I remember, hot and overcast, with

continual threats of rain, which never came to anything. The other boys

were too excited about the morrow to care for present play. They sat

instead along the edge of the broad platform-stoop in front of Delos

Ingersoll’s grocery-store, their brown feet swinging at varying

heights above the sidewalk, and bragged about the manner in which they

contemplated celebrating the anniversary of their Independence. Most of

the elder lads were very independent indeed; they were already secure in

the parental permission to stay up all night, so that the Fourth might

be ushered in with its full quota of ceremonial. The smaller urchins

pretended that they also had this permission, or were sure of getting

it. Little Denny Cregan attracted admiring attention by vowing that he

should remain out, even if his father chased him with a policeman all

around the ward, and he had to go and live in a cave in the gulf until

he was grown up.

My inferiority to these companions of mine depressed me. They were

allowed to go without shoes and stockings; they wore loose and

comfortable old clothes, and were under no responsibility to keep them

dry or clean or whole; they had their pockets literally bulging now

with all sorts of portentous engines of noise and racket--huge brown

“double-enders,” bound with waxed cord; long, slim, vicious-looking

“nigger-chasers;” big “Union torpedoes,” covered with clay, which made a

report like a horse-pistol, and were invaluable for frightening farmers’

horses; and so on through an extended catalogue of recondite and

sinister explosives upon which I looked with awe, as their owners

from time to time exhibited them with the proud simplicity of those

accustomed to greatness. Several of these boys also possessed toy

cannons, which would be brought forth at twilight. They spoke firmly of

ramming them to the muzzle with grass, to produce a greater noise--even

if it burst them and killed everybody.

By comparison, my lot was one of abasement. I was a solitary child, and

a victim to conventions. A blue necktie was daily pinned under my Byron

collar, and there were gilt buttons on my zouave jacket. When we were

away in the pasture playground near the gulf, and I ventured to take off

my foot-gear, every dry old thistle-point in the whole territory seemed

to arrange itself to be stepped upon by my whitened and tender soles.

I could not swim; so, while my lithe bold comrades dived out of sight

under the deep water, and darted about chasing one another far beyond

their depth, I paddled ignobly around the “baby-hole” close to the bank,

in the warm and muddy shallows.

Especially apparent was my state of humiliation on this July afternoon.

I had no “double-enders,” nor might hope for any. The mere thought of

a private cannon seemed monstrous and unnatural to me. By some unknown

process of reasoning my mother had years before reached the theory that

a good boy ought to have two ten-cent packs of small fire-crackers on

the Fourth of July. Four or five succeeding anniversaries had hardened

this theory into an orthodox tenet of faith, with all its observances

rigidly fixed. The fire-crackers were bought for me overnight, and

placed on the hall table. Beside them lay a long rod of punk. When I

hastened down and out in the morning, with these ceremonial implements

in my hands, the hired girl would give me, in an old kettle, some embers

from the wood-fire in the summer kitchen. Thus furnished, I went into

the front yard, and in solemn solitude fired off these crackers one by

one. Those which, by reason of having lost their tails, were only fit

for “fizzes,” I saved till after breakfast. With the exhaustion of

these, I fell reluctantly back upon the public for entertainment.

I could see the soldiers, hear the band and the oration, and in the

evening, if it didn’t rain, enjoy the fireworks; but my own contribution

to the patriotic noise was always over before the breakfast dishes had

been washed.

My mother scorned the little paper torpedoes as flippant and wasteful

things. You merely threw one of them, and it went off, she said, and

there you were. I don’t know that I ever grasped this objection in its

entirety, but it impressed my whole childhood with its unanswerableness.

Years and years afterward, when my own children asked for torpedoes, I

found myself unconsciously advising against them on quite the maternal

lines. Nor was it easy to budge the good lady from her position on the

great two-packs issue. I seem to recall having successfully undermined

it once or twice, but two was the rule. When I called her attention to

the fact that our neighbor, Tom Hemingway, thought nothing of exploding

a whole pack at a time inside their wash-boiler, she was not dazzled,

but only replied: “Wilful waste makes woful want.”

Of course the idea of the Hemingways ever knowing what want meant was

absurd. They lived a dozen doors or so from us, in a big white house

with stately white columns rising from veranda to gable across the whole

front, and a large garden, flowers and shrubs in front, fruit-trees and

vegetables behind. Squire Hemingway was the most important man in our

part of the town. I know now that he was never anything more than United

States Commissioner of Deeds, but in those days, when he walked down the

street with his gold-headed cane, his blanket-shawl folded over his arm,

and his severe, dignified, close-shaven face held well up in the air, I

seemed to behold a companion of Presidents.

This great man had two sons. The elder of them,

De Witt Hemingway, was a man grown, and was at the front. I had seen him

march away, over a year before, with a bright drawn sword, at the side

of his company. The other son, Tom, was my senior by only a twelvemonth.

He was by nature proud, but often consented to consort with me when the

selection of other available associates was at low ebb.

It was to this Tom that I listened with most envious eagerness, in front

of the grocery-store, on the afternoon of which I speak. He did not

sit on the stoop with the others--no one expected quite that degree of

condescension--but leaned nonchalantly against a post, whittling out a

new ramrod for his cannon. He said that this year he was not going to

have any ordinary fire-crackers at all; they, he added with a meaning

glance at me, were only fit for girls. He might do a little in

“double-enders,” but his real point would be in “ringers”--an incredible

giant variety of cracker, Turkey-red like the other, but in size almost

a rolling-pin. Some of these he would fire off singly, between volleys

from his cannon. But a good many he intended to explode, in bunches say

of six, inside the tin wash-boiler, brought out into the middle of the

road for that purpose. It would doubtless blow the old thing sky-high,

but that didn’t matter. They could get a new one.

Even as he spoke, the big bell in the tower of the town-hall burst forth

in a loud clangor of swift-repeated strokes. It was half a mile away,

but the moist air brought the urgent, clamorous sounds to our ears as if

the belfry had stood close above us.

We sprang off the stoop and stood poised, waiting to hear the number of

the ward struck, and ready to scamper off on the instant if the fire was

anywhere in our part of the town. But the excited peal went on and on,

without a pause. It became obvious that this meant something besides a

fire. Perhaps some of us wondered vaguely what that something might be,

but as a body our interest had lapsed. Billy Norris, who was the son of

poor parents, but could whip even Tom Hemingway, said he had been told

that the German boys on the other side of the gulf were coming over to

“rush” us on the following day, and that we ought all to collect nails

to fire at them from our cannon. This we pledged ourselves to do--the

bell keeping up its throbbing tumult ceaselessly.

Suddenly we saw the familiar figure of Johnson running up the street

toward us. What his first name was I never knew. To every one, little

or big, he was just Johnson. He and his family had moved into our town

after the war began; I fancy they moved away again before it ended. I

do not even know what he did for a living. But he seemed always drunk,

always turbulently good-natured, and always shouting out the news at the

top of his lungs. I cannot pretend to guess how he found out everything

as he did, or why, having found it out, he straightway rushed homeward,

scattering the intelligence as he ran. Most probably Johnson was moulded

by Nature as a town-crier, but was born by accident some generations

after the race of bellmen had disappeared. Our neighborhood did not like

him; our mothers did not know Mrs. Johnson, and we boys behaved with

snobbish roughness to his children. He seemed not to mind this at all,

but came up unwearyingly to shout out the tidings of the day for our

benefit.

“Vicksburg’s fell! Vicksburg’s fell!” was what we heard him yelling as

he approached.

Delos Ingersoll and his hired boy ran out of the grocery. Doors opened

along the street and heads were thrust inquiringly out.

“Vicksburg’s fell!” he kept hoarsely proclaiming, his arms waving in

the air, as he staggered along at a dog-trot past us, and went into the

saloon next to the grocery.

I cannot say how definite an idea these tidings conveyed to our boyish

minds. I have a notion that at the time I assumed that Vicksburg had

something to do with Gettysburg, where I knew, from the talk of my

elders, that an awful fight had been proceeding since the middle of the

week. Doubtless this confusion was aided by the fact that an hour or so

later, on that same wonderful day, the wire brought us word that this

terrible battle on Pennsylvanian soil had at last taken the form of a

Union victory. It is difficult now to see how we could have known both

these things on the Third of July--that is to say, before the people

actually concerned seemed to have been sure of them. Perhaps it was only

inspired guesswork, but I know that my town went wild over the news, and

that the clouds overhead cleared away as if by magic.

The sun did well to spread that summer sky at eventide with all the

pageantry of color the spectrum knows. It would have been preposterous

that such a day should slink off in dull, Quaker drabs. Men were

shouting in the streets now. The old cannon left over from the Mexican

war had been dragged out on to the rickety covered river-bridge, and was

frightening the fishes, and shaking the dry, worm-eaten rafters, as fast

as the swab and rammer could work. Our town bandsmen were playing

as they had never played before, down in the square in front of the

post-office. The management of the Universe could not hurl enough wild

fireworks into the exultant sunset to fit our mood.

The very air was filled with the scent of triumph--the spirit of

conquest. It seemed only natural that I should march off to my mother

and quite collectedly tell her that I desired to stay out all night with

the other boys. I had never dreamed of daring to prefer such a request

in other years. Now I was scarcely conscious of surprise when she gave

her permission, adding with a smile that I would be glad enough to come

in and go to bed before half the night was over.

I steeled my heart after supper with the proud resolve that if the night

turned out to be as protracted as one of those Lapland winter nights we

read about in the geography, I still would not surrender.

The boys outside were not so excited over the tidings of my unlooked-for

victory as I had expected them to be. They received the news, in fact,

with a rather mortifying stoicism. Tom Hemingway, however, took enough

interest in the affair to suggest that, instead of spending my twenty

cents in paltry fire-crackers, I might go down town and buy another

can of powder for his cannon. By doing so, he pointed out, I would be

a part-proprietor, as it were, of the night’s performance, and would be

entitled to occasionally touch the cannon off. This generosity affected

me, and I hastened down the long hill-street to show myself worthy of

it, repeating the instruction of “Kentucky Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain”

over and over again to myself as I went.

Half-way on my journey I overtook a person whom, even in the gathering

twilight, I recognized as Miss Stratford, the school-teacher. She also

was walking down the hill and rapidly. It did not need the sight of a

letter in her hand to tell me that she was going to the post-office. In

those cruel war-days everybody went to the post-office. I myself went

regularly to get our mail, and to exchange shin-plasters for one-cent

stamps with which to buy yeast and other commodities that called for

minute fractional currency.

Although I was very fond of Miss Stratford--I still recall her gentle

eyes, and pretty, rounded, dark face, in its frame of long, black curls,

with tender liking--I now coldly resolved to hurry past, pretending not

to know her. It was a mean thing to do; Miss Stratford had always been

good to me, shining in that respect in brilliant contrast to my

other teachers, whom I hated bitterly. Still, the “Kentucky

Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” was too important a matter to wait upon any

mere female friendships, and I quickened my pace into a trot, hoping to

scurry by unrecognized.

“Oh, Andrew! is that you?” I heard her call out as I ran past. For the

instant I thought of rushing on, quite as if I had not heard. Then I

stopped and walked beside her.

“I am going to stay up all night: mother says I may; and I am going to

fire off Tom Hemingway’s big cannon every fourth time, straight through

till breakfast time,” I announced to her loftily.

“Dear me! I ought to be proud to be seen walking with such an important

citizen,” she answered, with kindly playfulness. She added more gravely,

after a moment’s pause: “Then Tom is out playing with the other boys, is

he?”

“Why, of course!” I responded. “He always lets us stand around when he

fires off his cannon. He’s got some ‘ringers’ this year too.”

I heard Miss Stratford murmur an impulsive “Thank God!” under her

breath.

Full as the day had been of surprises, I could not help wondering that

the fact of Tom’s ringers should stir up such profound emotions in the

teacher’s breast. Since the subject so interested her, I went on with a

long catalogue of Tom’s other pyrotechnic possessions, and from that to

an account of his almost supernatural collection of postage-stamps. In

a few minutes more I am sure I should have revealed to her the great

secret of my life, which was my determination, in case I came to assume

the victorious rôle and rank of Napoleon, to immediately make Tom a

Marshal of the Empire.

But we had reached the post-office square. I had never before seen it so

full of people.

Even to my boyish eyes the tragic line of division which cleft this

crowd in twain was apparent. On one side, over by the Seminary, the

youngsters had lighted a bonfire, and were running about it--some of

the bolder ones jumping through it in frolicsome recklessness. Close by

stood the band, now valiantly thumping out “John Brown’s Body” upon the

noisy night air. It was quite dark by this time, but the musicians knew

the tune by heart. So did the throng about them, and sang it with lusty

fervor. The doors of the saloon toward the corner of the square were

flung wide open. Two black streams of men kept in motion under the

radiance of the big reflector-lamp over these doors--one going in, one

coming out. They slapped one another on the back as they passed, with

exultant screams and shouts. Every once in a while, when movement was

for the instant blocked, some voice lifted above the others would begin

“Hip-hip-hip-hip--” and then would come a roar that fairly drowned the

music.

On the post-office side of the square there was no bonfire. No one

raised a cheer. A densely packed mass of men and women stood in front

of the big square stone building, with its closed doors, and curtained

windows upon which, from time to time, the shadow of some passing clerk,

bareheaded and hurried, would be momentarily thrown. They waited in

silence for the night mail to be sorted. If they spoke to one another,

it was in whispers--as if they had been standing with uncovered heads at

a funeral service in a graveyard. The dim light reflected over from

the bonfire, or down from the shaded windows of the post-office, showed

solemn, hard-lined, anxious faces. Their lips scarcely moved when they

muttered little low-toned remarks to their neighbors. They spoke from

the side of the mouth, and only on one subject.

“He went all through Fredericksburg without a scratch--”

“He looks so much like me--General Palmer told my brother he’d have

known his hide in a tan-yard--”

“He’s been gone--let’s see--it was a year some time last April--”

“He was counting on a furlough the first of this month. I suppose nobody

got one as things turned out--‘’

“He said, ‘No; it ain’t my style. I’ll fight as much as you like, but I

won’t be nigger-waiter for no man, captain or no captain ‘--”

Thus I heard the scattered murmurs among the grown-up heads above me, as

we pushed into the outskirts of the throng, and stood there, waiting for

the rest. There was no sentence without a “he” in it. A stranger might

have fancied that they were all talking of one man. I knew better. They

were the fathers and mothers, the sisters, brothers, wives of the

men whose regiments had been in that horrible three days’ fight at

Gettysburg. Each was thinking and speaking of his own, and took it

for granted the others would understand. For that matter, they all

did understand. The town knew the name and family of every one of the

twelve-score sons she had in this battle.

It is not very clear to me now why people all went to the post-office

to wait for the evening papers that came in from the nearest big city.

Nowadays they would be brought in bulk and sold on the street before the

mail-bags had reached the post-office. Apparently that had not yet been

thought of in our slow old town.

The band across the square had started up afresh with “Annie Lisle”--the

sweet old refrain of “Wave willows, murmur waters,” comes back to me now

after a quarter-century of forgetfulness--when all at once there was a

sharp forward movement of the crowd. The doors had been thrown open,

and the hallway was on the instant filled with a swarming multitude.

The band had stopped as suddenly as it began, and no more cheering was

heard. We could see whole troops of dark forms scudding toward us from

the other side of the square.

“Run in for me--that’s a good boy--ask for Dr. Stratford’s mail,” the

teacher whispered, bending over me.

It seemed an age before I finally got back to her, with the paper in its

postmarked wrapper buttoned up inside my jacket. I had never been in

so fierce and determined a crowd before, and I emerged from it at last,

confused in wits and panting for breath.

I was still looking about through the gloom in a foolish way for Miss

Stratford, when I felt her hand laid sharply on my shoulder.

“Well--where is it?--did nothing come?” she asked, her voice trembling

with eagerness, and the eyes which I had thought so soft and dove-like

flashing down upon me as if she were Miss Pritchard, and I had been

caught chewing gum in school.

I drew the paper out from under my roundabout, and gave it to her. She

grasped it, and thrust a finger under the cover to tear it off. Then she

hesitated for a moment, and looked about her. “Come where there is some

light,” she said, and started up the street. Although she seemed to have

spoken more to herself than to me, I followed her in silence, close to

her side.

For a long way the sidewalk in front of every lighted store-window was

thronged with a group of people clustered tight about some one who had

a paper, and was reading from it aloud. Beside broken snatches of this

monologue, we caught, now groans of sorrow and horror, now exclamations

of proud approval, and even the beginnings of cheers, broken in upon by

a general “’Sh-h!” as we hurried past outside the curb.

It was under a lamp in the little park nearly halfway up the hill that

Miss Stratford stopped, and spread the paper open. I see her still,

white-faced, under the flickering gaslight, her black curls making

a strange dark bar between the pale-straw hat and the white of her

shoulder shawl and muslin dress, her hands trembling as they held up the

extended sheet. She scanned the columns swiftly, skimmingly for a time,

as I could see by the way she moved her round chin up and down. Then

she came to a part which called for closer reading. The paper shook

perceptibly now, as she bent her eyes upon it. Then all at once it fell

from her hands, and without a sound she walked away.

I picked the paper up and followed her along the gravelled path. It was

like pursuing a ghost, so weirdly white did her summer attire now look

to my frightened eyes, with such a swift and deathly silence did she

move. The path upon which we were described a circle touching the four

sides of the square. She did not quit it when the intersection with our

street was reached, but followed straight round again toward the point

where we had entered the park. This, too, in turn, she passed, gliding

noiselessly forward under the black arches of the overhanging elms. The

suggestion that she did not know she was going round and round in a ring

startled my brain. I would have run up to her now if I had dared.

Suddenly she turned, and saw that I was behind her. She sank slowly

into one of the garden-seats, by the path, and held out for a moment a

hesitating hand toward me. I went up at this and looked into her face.

Shadowed as it was, the change I saw there chilled my blood. It was like

the face of some one I had never seen before, with fixed, wide-open,

staring eyes which seemed to look beyond me through the darkness, upon

some terrible sight no other could see.

“Go--run and tell--Tom--to go home! His brother--his brother has been

killed,” she said to me, choking over the words as if they hurt her

throat, and still with the same strange dry-eyed, far-away gaze covering

yet not seeing me.

I held out the paper for her to take, but she made no sign, and I

gingerly laid it on the seat beside her. I hung about for a minute or

two longer, imagining that she might have something else to say--but no

word came. Then, with a feebly inopportune “Well, good-by,” I started

off alone up the hill.

It was a distinct relief to find that my companions were congregated at

the lower end of the common, instead of their accustomed haunt farther

up near my home, for the walk had been a lonely one, and I was deeply

depressed by what had happened. Tom, it seems, had been called away some

quarter of an hour before. All the boys knew of the calamity which had

befallen the Hemingways. We talked about it, from time to time, as we

loaded and fired the cannon which Tom had obligingly turned over to my

friends. It had been out of deference to the feelings of the stricken

household that they had betaken themselves and their racket off to the

remote corner of the common. The solemnity of the occasion silenced

criticism upon my conduct in forgetting to buy the powder. “There would

be enough as long as it lasted,” Billy Norris said, with philosophic

decision.

We speculated upon the likelihood of De Witt Hemingway’s being given a

military funeral. These mournful pageants had by this time become such

familiar things to us that the prospect of one more had no element of

excitement in it, save as it involved a gloomy sort of distinction for

Tom. He would ride in the first mourning-carriage with his parents, and

this would associate us, as we walked along ahead of the band, with the

most intimate aspects of the demonstration. We regretted now that

the soldier company which we had so long projected remained still

unorganized. Had it been otherwise we would probably have been awarded

the right of the line in the procession. Some one suggested that it was

not too late--and we promptly bound ourselves to meet after breakfast

next day to organize and begin drilling. If we worked at this night and

day, and our parents instantaneously provided us with uniforms and guns,

we should be in time. It was also arranged that we should be called the

De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves, and that Billy Norris should be side

captain. The chief command would, of course, be reserved for Tom. We

would specially salute him as he rode past in the closed carriage, and

then fall in behind, forming his honorary escort.

None of us had known the dead officer closely, owing to his advanced

age. He was seven or eight years older than even Tom. But the more

elderly among our group had seen him play base-ball in the academy nine,

and our neighborhood was still alive with legends of his early audacity

and skill in collecting barrels and dry-goods boxes at night for

election bonfires. It was remembered that once he carried away a whole

front-stoop from the house of a little German tailor on one of the

back streets. As we stood around the heated cannon, in the great black

solitude of the common, our fancies pictured this redoubtable young man

once more among us--not in his blue uniform, with crimson sash and sword

laid by his side, and the gauntlets drawn over his lifeless hands, but

as a taller and glorified Tom, in a roundabout jacket and copper-toed

boots, giving the law on this his playground. The very cannon at our

feet had once been his. The night air became peopled with ghosts of his

contemporaries--handsome boys who had grown up before us, and had gone

away to lay down their lives in far-off Virginia or Tennessee.

These heroic shades brought drowsiness in their train. We lapsed into

long silences, punctuated by yawns, when it was not our turn to ram and

touch off the cannon. Finally some of us stretched ourselves out on the

grass, in the warm darkness, to wait comfortably for this turn to come.

What did come instead was daybreak--finding Billy Norris and myself

alone constant to our all night vow. We sat up and shivered as we rubbed

our eyes. The morning air had a chilling freshness that went to my

bones--and these, moreover, were filled with those novel aches and

stiffnesses which beds were invented to prevent. We stood up, stretching

out our arms, and gaping at the pearland-rose beginnings of the sunrise

in the eastern sky. The other boys had all gone home, and taken the

cannon with them. Only scraps of torn paper and tiny patches of burnt

grass marked the site of our celebration.

My first weak impulse was to march home without delay, and get into bed

as quickly as might be. But Billy Norris looked so finely resolute and

resourceful that I hesitated to suggest this, and said nothing, leaving

the initiative to him. One could see, by the most casual glance, that

he was superior to mere considerations of unseasonableness in hours.

I remembered now that he was one of that remarkable body of boys, the

paper-carriers, who rose when all others were asleep in their warm

nests, and trudged about long before breakfast distributing the

_Clarion_ among the well-to-do households. This fact had given him his

position in our neighborhood as quite the next in leadership to Tom

Hemingway.

He presently outlined his plans to me, after having tried the centre

of light on the horizon, where soon the sun would be, by an old brass

compass he had in his pocket--a process which enabled him, he said, to

tell pretty well what time it was. The paper wouldn’t be out for nearly

two hours yet--and if it were not for the fact of a great battle, there

would have been no paper at all on this glorious anniversary--but he

thought we would go downtown and see what was going on around about the

newspaper office. Forthwith we started. He cheered my faint spirits by

assuring me that I would soon cease to be sleepy, and would, in fact,

feel better than usual. I dragged my feet along at his side, waiting for

this revival to come, and meantime furtively yawning against my sleeve.

Billy seemed to have dreamed a good deal, during our nap on the common,

about the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves. At least he had now in his

head a marvellously elaborated system of organization, which he unfolded

as we went along. I felt that I had never before realized his greatness,

his born genius for command. His scheme halted nowhere. He allotted

offices with discriminating firmness; he treated the question of

uniforms and guns as a trivial detail which would settle itself; he

spoke with calm confidence of our offering our services to the

Republic in the autumn; his clear vision saw even the materials for a

fife-and-drum corps among the German boys in the back streets. It was

true that I appeared personally to play a meagre part in these great

projects; the most that was said about me was that I might make a fair

third-corporal. But Fate had thrown in my way such a wonderful chance of

becoming intimate with Billy that I made sure I should swiftly advance

in rank--the more so as I discerned in the background of his thoughts,

as it were, a grim determination to make short work of Tom Hemingway’s

aristocratic pretensions, once the funeral was over.

We were forced to make a detour of the park on our way down, because

Billy observed some halfdozen Irish boys at play with a cannon inside,

whom he knew to be hostile. If there had been only four, he said, he

would have gone in and routed them. He could whip any two of them, he

added, with one hand tied behind his back. I listened with admiration.

Billy was not tall, but he possessed great thickness of chest and length

of arm. His skin was so dark that we canvassed the theory from time

to time of his having Indian blood. He did not discourage this, and he

admitted himself that he was double-jointed.

The streets of the business part of the town, into which we now made

our way, were quite deserted. We went around into the yard behind the

printing-office, where the carrier-boys were wont to wait for the press

to get to work; and Billy displayed some impatience at discovering that

here too there was no one. It was now broad daylight, but through the

windows of the composing-room we could see some of the printers still

setting type by kerosene lamps.

We seated ourselves at the end of the yard on a big, flat, smooth-faced

stone, and Billy produced from his pocket a number of “em” quads, so he

called them, and with which the carriers had learned from the printers’

boys to play a very beautiful game. You shook the pieces of metal in

your hands and threw them on the stone; your score depended upon the

number of nicked sides that were turned uppermost. We played this game

in the interest of good-fellowship for a little. Then Billy told me that

the carriers always played it for pennies, and that it was unmanly for

us to do otherwise. He had no pennies at that precise moment, but would

pay at the end of the week what he had lost; in the meantime there was

my twenty cents to go on with. After this Billy threw so many nicks

uppermost that my courage gave way, and I made an attempt to stop the

game; but a single remark from him as to the military destiny which he

was reserving for me, if I only displayed true soldierly nerve and grit,

sufficed to quiet me once more, and the play went on. I had now only

five cents left.

Suddenly a shadow interposed itself between the sunlight and the stone.

I looked up, to behold a small boy with bare arms and a blackened apron

standing over me, watching our game. There was a great deal of ink on

his face and hands, and a hardened, not to say rakish expression in his

eye.

“Why don’t you ‘jeff’ with somebody of your own size?” he demanded of

Billy after having looked me over critically.

He was not nearly so big as Billy, and I expected to see the latter

instantly rise and crush him, but Billy only laughed and said we were

playing for fun; he was going to give me all my money back. I was

rejoiced to hear this, but still felt surprised at the propitiatory

manner Billy adopted toward this diminutive inky boy. It was not the

demeanor befitting a side-captain--and what made it worse was that the

strange boy loftily declined to be cajoled by it. He sniffed when Billy

told him about the military company we were forming; he coldly shook his

head, with a curt “Nixie!” when invited to join it; and he laughed aloud

at hearing the name our organization was to bear.

“He ain’t dead at all--that De Witt Hemingway,” he said, with jeering

contempt.

“Hain’t he though!” exclaimed Billy. “The news come last night. Tom had

to go home--his mother sent for him--on account of it!”

“I’ll bet you a quarter he ain’t dead,” responded the practical inky

boy. “Money up, though!”

“I’ve only got fifteen cents. I’ll bet you that, though,” rejoined

Billy, producing my torn and dishevelled shin-plasters.

“All right! Wait here!” said the boy, running off to the building and

disappearing through the door. There was barely time for me to learn

from my companion that this printer’s apprentice was called “the devil,”

and could not only whistle between his teeth and crack his fingers, but

chew tobacco, when he reappeared, with a long narrow strip of paper

in his hand. This he held out for us to see, indicating with an ebon

forefinger the special paragraph we were to read. Billy looked at it

sharply, for several moments in silence. Then he said to me: “What does

it say there? I must ’a’ got some powder in my eyes last night.”

I read this paragraph aloud, not without an unworthy feeling that the

inky boy would now respect me deeply:

_“Correction. Lieutenant De Witt C. Hemingway, of Company A, --th New

York, reported in earlier despatches among the killed, is uninjured. The

officer killed is Lieutenant Carl Heinninge, Company F, same regiment.”_

Billy’s face visibly lengthened as I read this out, and he felt us both

looking at him. He made a pretence of examining the slip of paper again,

but in a half-hearted way. Then he ruefully handed over the fifteen

cents and, rising from the stone, shook himself.

“Them Dutchmen never was no good!” was what he said.

The inky boy had put the money in the pocket under his apron, and

grinned now with as much enjoyment as dignity would permit him to show.

He did not seem to mind any longer the original source of his winnings,

and it was apparent that I could not with decency recall it to him. Some

odd impulse prompted me, however, to ask him if I might have the paper

he had in his hand. He was magnanimous enough to present me with the

proof-sheet on the spot. Then with another grin he turned and left us.

Billy stood sullenly kicking with his bare toes into a sand-heap by the

stone. He would not answer me when I spoke to him. It flashed across my

perceptive faculties that he was not such a great man, after all, as I

had imagined. In another instant or two it had become quite clear to me

that I had no admiration for him whatever. Without a word I turned on

my heel and walked determinedly out of the yard and into the street,

homeward bent.

All at once I quickened my pace; something had occurred to me. The

purpose thus conceived grew so swiftly that soon I found myself running.

Up the hill I sped, and straight through the park. If the Irish boys

shouted after me I knew it not, but dashed on heedless of all else save

the one idea. I only halted, breathless and panting, when I stood on Dr.

Stratford’s doorstep, and heard the night-bell inside jangling shrilly

in response to my excited pull.

As I waited, I pictured to myself the old doctor as he would presently

come down, half-dressed and pulling on his coat as he advanced. He would

ask, eagerly, “Who is sick? Where am I to go?” and I would calmly

reply that he unduly alarmed himself, and that I had a message for his

daughter. He would, of course, ask me what it was, and I, politely but

firmly, would decline to explain to any one but the lady in person.

Just what might ensue was not clear--but I beheld myself throughout

commanding the situation, at once benevolent, polished, and inexorable.

The door opened with unlooked-for promptness, while my self-complacent

vision still hung in midair. Instead of the bald and spectacled old

doctor, there confronted me a white-faced, solemn-eyed lady in a black

dress, whom I did not seem to know. I stared at her, tongue-tied, till

she said, in a low, grave voice, “Well, Andrew, what is it?”

Then of course I saw that it was Miss Stratford, my teacher, the person

whom I had come to see. Some vague sense of what the sleepless night had

meant in this house came to me as I gazed confusedly at her mourning,

and heard the echo of her sad tones in my ears.

“Is some one ill?” she asked again.

“No; some one--some one is very well!” I managed to reply, lifting my

eyes again to her wan face. The spectacle of its drawn lines and pallor

all at once assailed my wearied and overtaxed nerves with crushing

weight. I felt myself beginning to whimper, and rushing tears scalded my

eyes. Something inside my breast seemed to be dragging me down through

the stoop.

I have now only the recollection of Miss Stratford’s kneeling by my

side, with a supporting arm around me, and of her thus unrolling and

reading the proof-paper I had in my hand. We were in the hall now,

instead of on the stoop, and there was a long silence. Then she put her

head on my shoulder and wept. I could hear and feel her sobs as if they

were my own.

“I--I didn’t think you’d cry--that you’d be so sorry,” I heard myself

saying, at last, in despondent self-defence.

Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a

finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were

laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once

more with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which youth

knows only once.

“Why, Andrew, boy,” she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all

at once, “didn’t you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?”

And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me.

MY AUNT SUSAN

MY AUNT SUSAN

I HELD the lamp, while Aunt Susan cut up the Pig.

The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this

great event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher’s to set in

train the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and

hours afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the

village street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at

the Four Corners, while the grocer’s hired man obligingly sharpened our

carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of

clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile in

the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for the

smudge in the smoke-barrel.

From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours to

a swifter pace, by paying visits to the wood-shed to have still another

look at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small icicles

in the crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared. My emotions

as I viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended legs, its

bland and pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness underneath, were

much mixed. Although I was his elder by seven or eight years, we had

been close friends during all his life--or all except a very few weeks

of his earliest sucking pig-hood, spent on his native farm. I had fed

him daily; I had watched him grow week by week; more than once I had

poked him with a stick as he ran around in his sty, to make him squeal

for the edification of neighbors’ boys who had come into our yard, and

would now be sharply ordered out again by Aunt Susan.

As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a

traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before

my eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to

eat--and straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking up

more chips from the ice.

From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous

incessant clatter of Aunt Susan’s carpet loom. Through the window I

could see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she

sat on her high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles,

this tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when

I first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of

a winter’s morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in

the recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom.

Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over

the stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open

frame of the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not

our habit to talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for

one thing, to have much time for conversation. The impression that she

preferred not to talk was always present in my boyish mind. I call up

the picture of her still as I saw her then under the top bar of the

cumbrous old machine, sitting with lips tight together, and resolute,

masterful eyes bent upon the twining intricacy of warp and woof before

her. At her side were piled a dozen or more big balls of carpet rags,

which the village wives and daughters cut up, sewed together and

wound in the long winter evenings, while the men-folks sat with their

stockinged feet on the stove hearth, and read out the latest “news from

the front” in their _Weekly Tribune_.

I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did

I often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general

village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished

lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch

all the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our

neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually

turning up at Aunt Susan’s loom. When Hiram Mabie’s checkered butternut

coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a

stage of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to

turn her flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her

bright saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been

done our little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I

saw approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted’s mother, the woman

who dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet she

had bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper in the

long run than the products of my aunt’s industry. I tingled with

indignation as she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and

stepping mincingly because her shoes were too tight for her.

Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors’ sayings and doings which

reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself with

a vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the confines of

her yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church, and treating

with frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come to our house

on business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this Juno Mills in

which we lived was not really our home. We had only been there for four

or five years--a space which indeed spanned all my recollections of

life--but left my Aunt more or less a stranger and a new-comer. She

spared no pains to maintain that condition. I can see now that there

were good reasons for this stern aloofness. At the time I thought it was

altogether due to the proud and unsociable nature of my Aunt.

In my child’s mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person.

People outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking

furtively over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at

all--was in truth just barely in the thirties.

Doubtless the fact that she was tall and dark, with very black hair,

and that years of steady concentration of sight, upon the strings and

threads of the loom, had scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her

near-sighted eyes gave me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in

all her ways and words, too, she was so far removed from any idea of

youthful softness! I could not remember her having ever kissed me. My

imagination never evolved the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had

always had at her hands uniformly good treatment, good food, good

clothes; after I had learned my letters from the old maroon plush label

on the Babbitt’s soap box which held the wood behind the stove, and

expanded this knowledge by a study of street signs, she had herself

taught me how to read, and later provided me with books for the village

school. She was my only known relative--the only person in the world

who had ever done anything for me. Yet it could not be said that I loved

her. Indeed she no more raised the suggestion of tenderness in my mind

than did the loom at which she spent her waking hours.

“The Perkinses asked me why you didn’t get the butcher to cut up the

pig,” I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove

griddles.

“It’s none of their business!” said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness.

“And Devillo Pollard’s got a new overcoat,” I added. “He hasn’t worn the

old army one now for upward of a week.”

“If this war goes on much longer,” commented my Aunt, “every carpet in

Dearborn County ‘ll be as blue as a whetstone.”

I think that must have been the entire conversation of the afternoon. I

especially recall the remark about the overcoat. For two years now

the balls of rags had contained an increasing proportion of pale blue

woollen strips, as the men of the country round about came home from

the South, or bought cheap garments from the second-hand dealers in

Tecumseh. All other colors had died out. There was only this light blue,

and the black of bombazine or worsted mourning into which the news in

each week’s papers forced one or another of the neighboring families.

To obviate this monotony, some of the women dyed their white rags with

butternut or even cochineal, but this was a mere drop in the bucket,

so to speak. The loom spun out only long, depressing rolls of black and

blue.

My memory leaps lightly forward now to the early evening, when I held

the lamp in the woodshed, and Aunt Susan cut up the pig.

How joyfully I watched her every operation! Every now and again my

interest grew so beyond proper bounds that I held the lamp sidewise,

and the flame smoked the chimney. I was in mortal terror over this lamp,

even when it was standing on the table quite by itself. We often read

in the paper of explosions from this new kerosene by which people were

instantly killed and houses wrapped in an unquenchable fire. Aunt Susan

had stood out against the strange invention, long after most of the

other homes of Juno Mills were familiar with the idea of the lamp. Even

after she had yielded, and I went to the grocery for more oil and fresh

chimneys and wicks, like other boys, she refused to believe that this

inflammable fluid was really squeezed out of hard coal, as they said.

And for years we lived in momentary belief that our lamp was about to

explode.

My fears of sudden death could not, however, for a moment stand up

against the delighted excitement with which I viewed the dismemberment

of the pig. It was very cold in the shed, but neither of us noticed

that. My Aunt attacked the job with skilful resolution and energy, as

was her way, chopping small bones, sawing vehemently through big ones,

hacking and slicing with the knife, like a strong man in a hurry.

For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was

detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse--always tacitly set

aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled with

ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to grow cold

in their own jelly--that pan to which I was free to repair any time of

day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too, with apron tied

round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees, reducing what remained

of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by my Aunt, and then fill

other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer savory hung in paper

flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up at them with rapture.

It seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in head-cheese and sausage

and in the hot gravy which basted the succulent spare-rib. Only the

abiding menace of the lamp kept me from dancing with delight.

Gradually, however, as my Aunt passed from the tid-bits to the more

substantial portions of her task, getting out the shoulders, the

hams for smoking, the pieces for salting down in the brine-barrel, my

enthusiasm languished a trifle. The lamp grew heavy as I changed it from

hand to hand, holding the free fingers at a respectful distance over the

chimney-top for warmth, and shuffling my feet about. It was truly very

cold. I strove to divert myself by smiling at the big shadow my bustling

Aunt cast against the house side of the shed, and by moving the lamp to

affect its proportions, but broke out into yawns instead. A mouse ran

swiftly across the scantling just under the lean-to roof. At the same

time I thought I caught the muffled sound of distant rapping, as if at

our own rarely used front door. I was too sleepy to decide whether I had

really heard a noise or not.

All at once I roused myself with a start. The lamp had nearly slipped

from my hands, and the horror of what might have happened frightened me

into wakefulness.

“The Perkins girls keep on calling me ‘Wise child.’ They yell it after

me all the while,” I said, desperately clutching at a subject which I

hoped would interest my Aunt. I had spoken to her about it a week or so

before, and it had stirred her quite out of her wonted stern calm. If

anything would induce her to talk now, it would be this.

“They do, eh?” she said, with an alert sharpness of voice, which

dwindled away into a sigh. Then, after a moment, she added, “Well,

never you mind. You just keep right on, tending to your own affairs, and

studying your lessons, and in time it’ll be you who can laugh at them

and all their low-down lot. They only do it to make you feel bad. Just

don’t you humor them.”

“But I don’t see,” I went on, “why--what do they call me ‘wise child’

_for?_ I asked Hi Budd, up at the Corners, but he only just chuckled and

chuckled to himself, and wouldn’t say a word.”

My Aunt suspended work for the moment, and looked severely down upon

me. “Well! Ira Clarence Blodgett!” she said, with grim emphasis, “I am

ashamed of you! I thought you had more pride! The idea of talking about

things like that with a coarse, rough, hired man--in a barn!”

To hear my full name thus pronounced, syllable by syllable, sent me

fairly weltering, as it were, under Aunt Susan’s utmost condemnation. It

was the punishment reserved for my gravest crimes. I hung my head, and

felt the lamp wagging nervelessly in my hands. I could not deny even her

speculative impeachment as to the barn; it was blankly apparent in my

mind that the fact of the barn made matters much worse. “I was helping

him wash their two-seated sleigh,” I submitted, weakly. “He asked me

to.”

“What does that matter?” she asked, peremptorily. “What business have

you got going around talking with men about me?”

“Why, it wasn’t about you at all, Aunt Susan,” I put in more

confidently. “I said the Perkins girls kept calling me ‘wise child,’ and

I asked Hi--”

Aunt Susan sighed once more, and interrupted me to inspect the wick of

the lamp. Then she turned again to her work, but less spiritedly now.

She took up the cleaver with almost an air of sadness.

“You don’t understand--yet,” she said. “But don’t make it any harder

for me by talking. Just go along and say nothing to nobody. People will

think more of you.”

My mind strove in vain to grapple with this suggested picture of myself,

moving about in perpetual dumbness, followed everywhere by universal

admiration. The lamp would _not_ hold itself straight.

All at once we both distinctly heard the sound of footsteps close

outside. The noise of crunching on the dry, frozen snow came through

the thin clapboards with sharp resonance. Aunt Susan ceased cutting and

listened.

“I heard somebody rapping at the front door a spell ago,” I ventured

to whisper. My Aunt looked at me, and probably realized that I was too

sleepy to be accountable for my actions. At all events she said nothing,

but moved toward the low door of the shed, cleaver in hand.

“Who’s there?” she called out in shrill, belligerent tones; and this

demand she repeated, after an interval of silence, when an irresolute

knocking was heard on the door.

We heard a man coughing immediately outside the door. I saw Aunt Susan

start at the sound--almost as if she recognized it. A moment later this

man, whoever he was, mastered his cough sufficiently to call out, in a

hesitating way:

“Is that you, Susan?”

Aunt Susan raised her chin on the instant, her nostrils drawn in, her

eyes flashing like those of a pointer when he sees a gun lifted. I had

never seen her so excited. She wheeled round once, and covered me with

a swift, penetrating, comprehensive glance, under which my knees smote

together, and the lamp lurched perilously. Then she turned again, glided

toward the door, halted, moved backward two or three steps--looked again

at me, and this time spoke.

“Well, I _swan!_” was what she said, and I felt that she looked it.

“Susan! Is that you?” came the voice again, hoarsely appealing. It was

not the voice of any neighbor. I made sure I had never heard it before.

I could have smiled to myself at the presumption of any man calling my

Aunt by her first name, if I had not been too deeply mystified.

“I’ve been directed here to find Miss Susan Pike,” the man outside

explained, between fresh coughings.

“Well, then, mog your boots out of this as quick as ever you can!” my

Aunt replied, with great promptitude. “You won’t find her here!”

“But I _have_ found her!” the stranger protested, with an accent of

wearied deprecation. “Don’t you know me, Susan? I am not strong, this

cold air is very bad for me.”

“I say ‘get out!’” my Aunt replied, sharply. Her tone was unrelenting

enough, but I noted that she had tipped her head a little to one side,

a clear sign to me that she was opening her mind to argument. I felt

certain that presently I should see this man.

And, sure enough, after some further parley, Susan went to the door,

and, with a half-defiant gesture, knocked the hook up out of the staple.

“Come along then, if you must!” she said, in scornful tones. Then she

marched back till she stood beside me, angry resolution written all over

her face and the cleaver in her hand.

A tall, dark figure, opaque against a gleaming background of moonlight

and snowlight, was what I for a moment saw in the frame of the open

doorway. Then, as he entered, shut and hooked the door behind him, and

stood looking in a dazed way over at our lamplit group, I saw that he

was a slender, delicately featured man, with a long beard of yellowish

brown, and gentle eyes. He was clad as a soldier, heavy azure-hued

caped overcoat and all, and I already knew enough of uniforms--cruel

familiarity of my war-time infancy--to tell by his cap that he was an

officer. He coughed again before a word was spoken. He looked the

last man in the world to go about routing up peaceful households of a

winter’s night.

“Well, now--what is your business?” demanded Aunt Susan. She put her

hand on my shoulder as she spoke, something I had never known her to

do before. I felt confused under this novel caress, and it seemed only

natural that the stranger, having studied my Aunt’s face in a wistful

way for a moment, should turn his gaze upon me. I was truly a remarkable

object, with Aunt Susan’s hand on my shoulder.

“I could make no one hear at the other door. I saw the light through the

window here, and came around,” the stranger explained. He sent little

straying glances at the remains of the pig and at the weapon my Aunt

held at her side, but for the most part looked steadily at me.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Aunt Susan, coldly.

“What do you want, now that you _are_ here? Why did you come at all?

What business had you to think that I ever wanted to lay eyes on you

again? How could you have the courage to show your face here--in _my_

house?”

The man’s shoulders shivered under their cape, and a wan smile curled in

his beard. “You keep your house at a very low temperature,” he said with

grave pleasantry. He did not seem to mind Aunt Susan’s hostile demeanor

at all.

“I was badly wounded last September,” he went on, quite as if that was

what she had asked him, “and lay at the point of death for weeks. Then

they sent me North, and I have been in the hospital at Albany ever

since. One of the nurses there, struck by my name, asked me if I had

any relatives in her village--that is, Juno Mills. In that way I learned

where you were living. I suppose I ought not to have come--against

doctor’s orders--the journey has been too much--I have suffered a good

deal these last two hours.”

I felt my Aunt’s hand shake a little on my shoulder. Her voice, though,

was as implacable as ever.

“There is a much better reason than that why you should not have come,”

she said, bitterly.

The stranger was talking to her, but looking at me. He took a step

toward me now, with a softened sparkle in his eyes and an outstretched

hand. “This--this then is the boy, is it?” he asked.

With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me,

and drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she

lifted and almost brandished the cleaver.

“No, you don’t!” she cried. “You don’t touch him! He’s mine! I’ve worked

for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying mother’s

breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker ’n water after

all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and I kissed her

before she died. She gave the boy to me, and he’s mine! Mine, do you

hear?--_mine!_”

“My dear Susan--” our visitor began. “Don’t ‘dear Susan’ me! I heard it

once--once too often. Oh, never again! You left me to run away with her.

I don’t speak of that. I forgave that when I forgave her. But that was

the least of it. You left her to herself for months before she died.

You’ve left the boy to himself ever since. You can’t begin now. I’ve

worked my fingers to the bone for him--you can’t make me stop now.”

“I went to California,” he went on in a low voice, speaking with

difficulty. “We didn’t get on together as smoothly as we might perhaps,

but I had no earthly notion of deserting her. I was ill myself, lying in

yellow-fever quarantine off Key West, at the very time she died. When

I finally got back you and the child were both gone. I could not trace

you. I went to the war. I had made money in California. It is trebled

now. I rose to be Colonel--I have a Brigadier’s brevet in my pocket now.

Yet I give you my word I never have desired anything so much, all the

time, as to find you again--you and the boy.”

My Aunt nodded her head comprehendingly. I felt from the tremor of

her hand that she was forcing herself against her own desires to be

disagreeable.

“Yes, that war,” was what she said. “I know about that war! The honest

men that go get killed. But you--_you_ come back!”

The man frowned wearily, and gave a little groan of discouragement.

“Then this is final, is it? You don’t wish to speak with me; you really

desire to keep the boy--you are set against my ever seeing him--touching

him. Why, then, of course--of course--excuse my--”

And then for the first time I saw a human being tumble in a dead swoon.

My little brain, dazed and bewildered by the strange new things I was

hearing, lagged behind my eyes in following the sudden pallor on the

man’s face--lagged behind my ears in noting the tell-tale quaver and

gasp in his voice. Before I comprehended what was toward--lo! there was

no man standing in front of me at all.

Like a flash Aunt Susan snatched the lamp from my grasp and flung

herself upon her knees beside the limp and huddled figure. After a

momentary inspection of the white, bearded face, she set the lamp down

on the frozen earth floor and took his head upon her lap.

“Take the lamp, run to the buttery, and bring the bottle of hartshorn!”

she commanded me, hurriedly. “Or, no--wait--open the door--that’s

it--walk ahead with the light!”

The strong woman stood upright as she spoke, her shoulders braced

against the burden she bore in her arms. Unaided, with slow steps, she

carried the senseless form of the soldier into the living-room, and held

it without rest of any sort, the while I, under her direction, wildly

tore off quilts, blankets, sheets, and feather-tick from my bed and

heaped them up on the floor beside the stove. Then, when I had spread

them to her liking, she bent and gently laid him down.

“_Now_ get the hartshorn,” she said.. I heard her putting more wood on

the fire, but when I returned with the phial she sat once again with the

stranger’s head upon her knee. She was softly stroking the fine, waving

brown hair upon his brow, but her eyes were lifted, looking dreamily at

far-away things. I could have sworn to the beginnings of a smile about

her parted lips. It was not like my Aunt Susan at all.

“Come here, Ira,” I heard her say at last, after a long time had been

spent in silence. I walked over and stood at her shoulder, looking down

upon the pale face upturned against the black of her worn dress.

The blue veins just discernible in temples and closed eyelids, the

delicately turned features, the way his brown beard curled, the fact

that his breathing was gently regular once more--these are what I saw.

But my Aunt seemed to demand that I should see more.

“Well?” she asked, in a tone mellowed beyond all recognition. “Don’t

you--don’t you see who it is?”

I suppose I really must have had an idea by this time. But I remember

that I shook my head.

My Aunt positively did smile this time. “The Perkins girls were wrong,”

she said; “there isn’t the least smitch of a ‘wise child’ about _you!_”

There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in

the emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt’s

shoulder. The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained thus

for some minutes, watching together this strange addition to our family

party.

Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run

over to Dr. Peabody’s and fetch him back with me. The purport of my

mission oppressed me.

“Is he going to die then?” I asked.

Aunt Susan laughed outright. “You little goose,” she said; “do you think

the doctors kill people _every_ time?”

And, laughing again, with a trembling softness in her voice and tears

upon her black eyelashes, she lifted her face to mine--and kissed me!

*****

No fatality dogged good old Doctor Peabody’s big footsteps through the

snow that night. I fell asleep while he was still at my Aunt’s house,

but not before the stranger had recovered consciousness, and was sitting

up in the large rocking-chair, and it was clearly understood that he was

soon to be well again.

The kindly, garrulous doctor did more than reassure our little

household. He must have spent most of the night going about reassuring

the other households of Juno Mills. At all events, when I first went

out next morning--while our neighbors were still eating their buckwheat

cakes and pork fat by lamplight--everybody seemed to know that my

father, the distinguished Colonel Blodgett, had returned from the war on

sick-leave, and was lying ill at the house of his sister-in-law. I

felt at once the altered attitude of the village toward me. Important

citizens who had never spoken to me before--dignified and portly men

in blue cutaway coats with brass buttons, and high stiff hats of shaggy

white silk--stopped now to lay their hands on the top of my head and ask

me how my father, the Colonel, was getting along. The grocer’s hired man

gave me a Jackson ball and two molasses cookies the very first time I

saw him. Even the Perkins girls, during the course of the afternoon,

strolled over to our front gate, and, instead of hurling enigmatic

objurgations at me, invited me to come out and play. The butcher of his

own accord came and finished cutting up the pig.

These changes came back to me as one part of the great metamorphosis

which the night’s events had wrought. Another part was the definite

disappearance of the stern-faced, tirelessly toiling old maid I had

known all my life as Aunt Susan. In her place there was now a much

younger woman, with pleasant lines about her pretty mouth, and eyes that

twinkled when they looked at me, and who paid no attention to the loom

whatever, but bustled cheerily about the house instead, thinking only of

good things for us to eat.

I remember that I marked my sense of the difference by abandoning the

old name of Aunt Susan, and calling her now just “Auntie.” And one day,

in the mid-spring, after she and her convalescent patient had returned

from their first drive together in the country round about, she told

me, as she took off her new bonnet in an absent-minded way, and looked

meditatively at the old disused loom, and then bent down to brush my

forehead with her warm lips--she told me that henceforth I was to call

her Mother.