I went a few weeks ago out to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, to
attend the dedication of the gymnasium there built in memory
of Hugh McAllister Beaver; and as I came away, his father gave
me the history of his regiment in the Civil War, the 148th
Pennsylvania Volunteers. One of the first chapters of all is
entitled “The Sister’s Story.” It is the story of how some of
the lads of the regiment came to be enrolled. It was in the
year of 1862. President Lincoln had issued a call for 300,000
men and then a call for 300,000 more, and the War Department
had drawn up provisions for a draft in case the men were not
voluntarily offered; and this one county in Pennsylvania did not
wish to stand under the ignominy of a draft, but desired that
the men who were to go from that county should offer themselves
freely in response to that call. This sister tells of how the
appeal came to the little village in which she and her brother
lived, in Center County, Pennsylvania. There was a small country
academy there, and the summer vacation was just over, and the
boys and girls had come back from the farms for the first day of
the academy year again. She said that she came walking up the
village street with a friend of hers, another little child, and
as they came up the pathway through the yard of the school, arm
in arm, with a little bunch of flowers held in both their hands
and their heads bowed down very close together, as little girls
would talk with one another confidentially, they were suddenly
imprest with the silence of the school-yard. Instead of the
noise of play and the chatter of an opening day at school, all
the boys and the little girls were sitting quietly on the school
stoop, and when they came they asked the older boys what the
trouble was. Was there any specially dark tidings from the war?
And they said: “No, it was not that;” but Professor Patterson
had decided to enlist and he wanted to know how many of the
boys of the school would go with him, and a meeting was to be
held in the village church that evening, in which they were all
to be given an opportunity to say what they would do. She said
that at once she left her little companion and sought out her
brother, and she said to him, “Harry, are you going to enlist?”
and he said, “Yes, he thought he would.” “Well, but,” the mother
argued after they reached home, “you are only sixteen years old;
you can not enlist without father’s allowing you to go, and you
know how we have all built on you, on your brightness, and are
making sacrifices at home in order that you might go to college.
You must not go away now to the war.” He insisted that when the
opportunity came he was afraid he would have to respond. And the
sister tells how that night, in the little village church, when
Mr. McAllister, of Bellefonte, made his appeal for volunteers
and had finished, the principal of the academy rose with a long
paper in his hand; and her girlish heart almost stopt beating
when she realized what it was that he was going to do, and then
when he had made his careful, simple statement as to the purpose
that led him and the motives that constrained him, he said he
was going to call the school roll, and every boy who wanted to
could respond “Ready” to his name; and in a silence like the
silence of death he began at the top of the line: “Andrews,”
“Ready”; “Baker,” “Ready”; and when he came down to K the
little girl said her breath just absolutely stopt, and when the
name Keller was called, she heard a clear, boyish voice answer
without a tremor, “Ready” to his name.--R. E. SPEER,
“Student Volunteer Movement,” 1906.
(2732)
=Response=--See CHARACTER.
=Response of God=--See FATHERHOOD.