# Pratt Portraits/Chapter 5

NOW, Jane Bennett, you ain't no call to fash yourself about William," said Old Lady Pratt, looking over her steel bowed spectacles at her daughter. "William's got too good a head-piece to think jest as other folks do about every thing, and you might as well give up, fust as last, expectin' him to be cut and dried in his opinions."
Mrs. Henry Bennett, of Westville, who was paying her mother a visit, never let conversation languish for lack of a retort.
"I don't know 's William's got any better right to his opinions than other folks have to theirs. And it's my opinion that he's disgracing the family with his wrong-headed talk."
Old Lady Pratt bridled. "Ef the family never gits no wuss disgraced than that, I guess there wont be no great cause for blushin'."
"Well, Mother," snapped Jane. "You always did take William's part. I don't know 's we'd ought to expect you to change in your old age!"
Old Lady Pratt was not fond of bickerings, so she let this thrust pass without rebuke.
​Jane Bennett, as her mother had made a point of calling her, ever since she persisted in marrying contrary to the best advice, was something of a thorn in the old lady's flesh. One could see that, as often as the two women talked together. Jane was superficially almost the counterpart of her mother: in appearance, small, dark, and erect. But in her the decision of her mother's character took on the form of obstinacy; the wholesome tartness of the elder woman's speech, had, in the younger, degenerated to acidity. Old Lady Pratt was distinguished by a certain liberal mindedness. With some few exceptions she was open to new ideas and tolerant of innovations. Jane, though very much given to harboring fixed ideas, was inclined, when once her mind was turned in a new direction, to go to extremes. When homœopathy, for instance, came into vogue, she not only accepted it for herself, but she pushed her son, ignorant and untrained, into a pretence of the practice of it. The wrong thus wrought he discovered, and set right as far as in him lay, but Jane Bennett never suspected the harm she had done. She had nota keen scent for her own mistakes, and her self-complacence was, therefore, rarely disturbed. As few people ever argued with her, she had not that familiarity with opposition which more yielding natures early acquire. Hence she found it impossible to reconcile herself to the quiet declaration of a heresy with which her brother William had recently startled her.
​It was the troublous autumn of 1860. Abraham Lincoln's election had struck terror to the hearts of the conservative part of the community. Many a man who, four years later, was to regard that plain backwoodsman as the hero and savior of the nation, shrank from the impending consequences of his election. William Pratt was one of the conservatives.
"The South will secede," he had declared with conviction, when the election was discussed in family conclave.
"Then we'll teach them a lesson!" said his sister Jane, vindictively.
"I suppose we shall," William admitted, "but we haven't any business to. They have as good a right to go out of the Union as they had to come into it."
For a moment even Jane was speechless. Then she said with withering sarcasm: "Perhaps you think there's nothing wrong about slavery?"
"You've found me out, Jane. I will not deceive you. If the South should win, I propose to buy a cat-o'-nine-tails and a brace of bloodhounds, and apply for a place as overseer."
And that was all Jane could get out of her brother on the subject. His flippant jest about slavery could not be taken seriously, but at least it was clear that he believed in the right of secession, and she made the most of that.
Jane did not love her brother William. The two were "born to fight," as their placid, easy​going father—now at rest—had long ago declared. Jane's marriage and removal to another town might have brought about a truce, had she not carried with her the rankling memory of one of William's very worst and most reprehensible speeches. When all the family were up in arms about her predilection for Henry Bennett, William had said to his mother—and Jane had overheard the taunt: "We may as well make up our minds to Jane, Mother. There's no use in trying to reason with her, since she's got too old to be spanked."
It was certainly a most indecorous as well as disrespectful remark, and one which Jane had every reason to resent. How could she be expected, after that, to feel a proper gratitude, when the offender subsequently loaned her husband fifteen hundred dollars, without interest and with but small hope of return? What if this timely help did enable Henry Bennett to set up for himself in his trade of optician? What money obligations could atone to a really noble mind for a personal insult? Henceforth Jane nursed her grievance and hated her brother to her heart's content.
This was not the only time that William Pratt had "tied a knot with his tongue which he could not untie with his teeth." He was not a bad-tempered man himself, but he was often the occasion of bad temper in others. He had his enemies, men who, with or without reason, ​regarded him with strong antipathy, who hated the way he held his head and disliked the fashion of his canes. But he rarely put himself out for the sake of conciliating them. His own path had not been so smooth that he should feel the necessity of strewing rose-leaves under the feet of his fellow-creatures. There was, perhaps, more tenderness in his nature than he would have been willing to acknowledge, but it was not often called out now-a-days.
While yet a very young man, he had loved and married Isabel Allen, a woman peculiarly suited to him. There had been no disillusionment during the three happy years that followed—hardworking years, dearer to him than the hope of heaven. When a malignant disease robbed him, at one stroke, of his wife and boy, he felt that he had had his day, and he doggedly set himself to do his duty in an arid path. Though an unpopular man he soon earned the title of "public-spirited citizen." People learned that while an appeal to his feelings was not apt to be successful, an appeal to his reason, and to his sense of justice was rarely made in vain. It was the latter appeal that he yielded to when he thought he had discovered that Edna Brown had fallen in love with him. It happened about five years after the death of his wife. He did not particularly admire Edna Brown, though he was aware that most men did, and he would greatly have preferred to lead his own life, unhampered by new ​ties. But if Edna, who never concealed what she would have called her feelings, thought he could make her happy, he would not let his preferences stand in the way of her trying the experiment. Having married her, he was an excellent husband. Anything within reason that she wanted she might have. He was doing a good business in cotton, going to his office in the city every day, after the manner of suburbans—and in the course of time he built a very fine house, entirely in accordance with his wife's somewhat high-flying notions. Had Edna been exacting in the matter of sentiment he might not have found it so easy to content her, but as time went on it gradually dawned upon his plain, masculine intelligence, that perhaps, after all, Edna's infatuation had not been purely a tribute to his personal attractions. Such a discovery is not altogether pleasant to a man, even when the opposite state of things might be embarrassing. But William Pratt took it philosophically. He subjected his own physiognomy, mental and physical, to an impartial scrutiny, and he arrived at the conclusion that he had been a fool for his pains. That somewhat heavy countenance, with thick, bristling eyebrows and firm-set mouth, was not calculated to attract any woman, least of all an Edna Brown; that caustic tongue that had estranged so many friends was hardly adapted to wooing. He must have changed a good deal, he reflected drearily, since last he looked into Isabel's ​eyes and read their adoration. Poor Edna! Perhaps after all he had cheated her out of what most women want. And from that time forth there was an added touch of kindness and solicitousness in his dealings with her, which filled Edna with satisfaction, as showing that she had kept her husband's affection longer than many women do.
There were three children, Mary, the eldest, being now fourteen. Their father was fond of them all in his undemonstrative way, though he loved them with an unconscious mental reservation. Once there was a discussion in his hearing on the subject of the English law of primogeniture. He took no part in the talk himself, but his mind reverted to the two-year-old boy he had lost so long ago, and it seemed to him that there was, after all, something peculiarly strong in theclaims of one's first-born. His children, in their turn, found hima sufficiently kind and indulgent father, though they were not on terms of intimacy with him. At Christmas-time he took pains to find out their secret wishes. If the little girls sometimes incurred their mother's displeasure by tearing or soiling their clothes he was ready to intercede for them. If Willie, the baby, bumped his head and roared with pain and temper, it was his father who patiently sopped the bruise with cold water and told him not to cry. Yet William Pratt was not one of those fathers whose children cling about their legs and stand on the rounds of ​their chair, and the little ones thought nothing of going to bed without bidding him good-night.
With his nephews and nieces the case was not altogether different. They had a certain regard for him, largely induced by the transfer, from his pocket to theirs, of pennies, dimes, or quarters, the magnitude of the offering being carefully adapted to the age of the recipient. Heliked tosee them happy, and he did not know any other way of making them so. Yet there was not the same spontaneity in their affection for him, as in their love for Uncle Ben, whose small coins were not more migratory in their disposition than Uncle William's, but who had the gift of pinching their cheeks in a manner to rouse their deepest feelings, and who could tip them a wink worth more than money.
William's best friend was his mother, but even she was not his confidante. She had been very proud of his conquest of Edna Brown, the belle of Dunbridge, and she took his happiness for granted. If Old Lady Pratt had a favorite child, that child was William. She delighted in his sharp sayings almost as much as in his successful career and his singular uprightness. In fact the latter sometimes cost her a pang, so frequently did it conflict with her son's own interests.
Only a day or two after Jane's visit William came in to see his mother after church, as was his custom. His deaf sister, Betsy, who was just a little afraid of William, had trotted off, nothing ​loath, to help about the dinner. Old Lady Pratt having accomplished her devotions in a very thorough and satisfactory manner, had now put on her Sunday cap of white mull and her gold spectacles, and felt herself at liberty to consider worldly things.
"William," she said with much interest, "ain't cotton goin' up pretty fast?"
"Yes, there's been a big rise this month, and it's likely to go on if things don't quiet down at the South."
"Anson was tellin' me you'd got a large stock onhand. You'd oughter make a sight o' money."
"I don't expect to make more than usual."
"Why! I don't see how you can help it if you try."
"I sha'n't have to try so very hard. I shall sell my stock at a fair profit and no more."
"You don't mean tosay that you'll sell below the market-price!"
"If the market-price isn't a fair one I don't propose to be governed by it."
Old Lady Pratt was quick but never hasty. She got up and pulled the shade down in one of the south windows, and then she put on a little knit shawl, a contradictory mode of procedure which showed that her mind was not on whatshe was doing. After that she resumed her straight-backed chair and gave utterance to her views.
"'Pears to me you're wrong, William," she said. "'T ain't as though you sold straight to ​the people. They ain't going to git the good of your generosity. You'll only be a putting money into the pockets of the rich manufacturers. That's plain enough to see."
"If the manufacturers choose to pocket what doesn't belong to them, that isn't my lookout. It's hard times, and it's going to be harder, and I don't mean to get rich on other people's misfortunes."
This time Old Lady Pratt sat still and thought. Her silence was particularly impressive, as she had not even her week-day knitting to bridge it over. At last she said, reflectively: "I'm afraid you 'reall wrong, William. 'T ain't the way folks do business—though I ain't sure that your father wouldn't have acted just so. And I declare for 't," with a sudden impulsiveness very unusual in her. "Ef I was you, I believe I'd ruther be wrong than right!"
And then to her son's unbounded surprise the self-contained old lady came over and gave him a hearty kiss—a thing which had not happened, except on state occasions, since he was a small boy.
William himself had no misgivings. He was accustomed to thinking things out for himself, and he had very little regard for "consequences," that bugbear of many a thinker. It used to seem to him as though certain of the practical men of his acquaintance were always trying to hit the bull's-eye by aiming somewhere else. They fired ​away and reloaded, and fired away again, and collected their bag of game entirely regardless of the target, which, nevertheless, most of them had set up for themselves at the beginning of the match. He was quite ready to acknowledge that he missed his aim as often as not, but it was not for the sake of side issues. And as to this matter of the cotton, he did not care to go into the pros and cons of it. There was but one thing to be considered, and that was an innate repugnance to making money out of other people's misfortunes. He not only would not do it if it was wrong; he would have hated to do it if it had been ever so right.
On the question of the right of secession William Pratt had thought long and deeply, though perhaps a little confusedly. He lived in a very loyal community. The Union was something which most of his neighbors could not reason about. It was something sacred and unassailable as the moral law. If he tried to argue with them they looked at him askance, quite as though he had undertaken to defend kidnapping or burglary. It is possible that the opinion which he had arrived at was partly the result of a natural antagonism. William Pratt was so constituted that if he had been told every day of his life that a quadruped had necessarily four legs, it is more than likely that he would have come firmly to believe in the existence of a five-legged beast of that description. ​He hated to be talked at, and was capable of loving his opinions as he loved his children, merely because they were his own. As the dreary anxious winter wore away, he did himself more than one ill turn by his rough handling of other people's prejudices.
One Friday evening in early April William went with his wife to prayer-meeting. He was a church member, but to Edna's chagrin he had never been able to overcome a certain reticence sufficiently to take an active part in such a meeting. It was an understood thing that he was not to be called upon, and being thus exempt he used regularly to attend on Friday evenings. It was one of the many things he did purely from a sense of duty.
The prayer-meetings of late had been particularly fervent. The community was in a state of unnatural excitement. The sense of an impending crisis brooded heavily upon all hearts, and in the strong tension of public feeling an appeal to divine aid was the natural impulse of every religious man. William had noticed with growing dissatisfaction the tendency of these meetings. The minister himself, who was a strong antislavery man, gave the tone to the proceedings. It seemed to William that a prayer-meeting should not be turned into an expression of partisan feeling. On this occasion he listened with ill-suppressed indignation to the prayers which followed each other in quick succession. Nearly ​every one of them was an appeal for aid for the Northern cause. As he listened he was reminded of the somewhat personal tone Jane's devotions had once taken when he and she were children: "Please God, make Mother box Willie's ears."
When, at last, one of the most eloquent of the brethren openly called for the vengeance of the Lord to be visited upon the offending South, William felt that his turn had come. To the amazement of his wife, he rose deliberately to his feet, and gave the premonitory cough customary on such occasions. The vestry-room was but feebly lighted by kerosene lamps, one of which was smoking badly. In the dim, uncertain light he could just see the furtive glances which were turned towards him as the people in the sparsely filled seats covered their faces with their hands. When all heads were bowed, he began his prayer in a voice a little harsh from contending emotions: "God Almighty, we pray Thy mercy on our land. We pray to be delivered from war. We pray to be delivered from disunion. We pray, also, to be delivered from the commission of injustice. We pray. Thee, O God, to deliver the North from the calamities which we dread. And we pray. Thee to deliver our sister, the South, from the vengeance which we threaten. Change Thou the hearts of the North and of the South. Deliver us from ourselves, that the terrors of war and of disunion may be averted. Forgive our partisanship. Forgive our evil passions. Lead ​us in the ways of equity and peace. Hear, O God, our prayer, not for our sakes, but for the sake of justice and humanity. Amen."
As the bowed heads were lifted at the close of this very unconventional prayer, none were turned toward the speaker. A constraint had fallen upon the meeting. Fortunately the time was up, and it was not necessary to prolong the session. The minister had risen to announce the closing hymn, when there was a sudden sound of cracking glass, and the broken chimney of the smoking lamp fell down on the heads and knees of the people below. There was a commotion in that corner until the flaring light was extinguished, and then the minister gave out the closing hymn: "Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing." The inharmonious voices of the congregation rose and fell in lagging cadence upon the well-known tune, and then "the peace of God, which passeth understanding," was invoked upon the heads of the belligerent meeting, and William Pratt found himself at liberty to go out into the pure night air, beneath those clear burning lights of heaven, that neither smoke nor flare.
Edna followed him dejectedly. Why had she ever wished him to "take part"? She might have known he could not do it like other people. They walked on in silence for some distance, till at last she felt that forbearance was a weakness. Edna not infrequently found it her duty to remon​strate with her husband, though her reproofs were always couched in the most considerate language.
"I am almost sorry you made that prayer, dear," she began, gently. She usually called him "dear" when she was not pleased with him.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I'm afraid it gave offence."
"To whom?"
"Why, to all the people."
"It was addressed to the Almighty," he said curtly, and after that he said no more about it.
But as he met his fellow-Christians in the week that followed he noticed a marked coolness in their demeanor toward himself, and he rejoiced more and more that he had taken a stand.
Early in the following week his brother Ben looked in on him at his office—jovial, sweettempered Ben, who hated a row.
"How are you, Bill?" said he. "Got time for a smoke?" Ben was the only person who ever thought of calling him Bill.
They were soon established with their cigars, their feet on the office stove, Ben's chair tilted back at a genial angle. He presently came to, the point.
"Look here, Bill. What put it into your head to stir up the meeting with a long pole last Friday evening? Anson is in a great state of mind. He says all the old Tabbies in town are by the ears about it."
​"I don't know what you mean by a long pole," said William, gruffly; "I asked the Lord to bless the North and the South and to keep them from laying hands on each other."
"Not much use in that," Ben declared. "There's bound to be a war."
"Think so? I'm afraid you're right."
For a time they puffed on in silence. Then William asked:
"What shall you do about it if there is one?"
"Do about it?"
"Yes, do about it. Shall you fight?"
"I? Fight? Good gracious no! I'm no fighting man. I couldn't stick a bayonet intoa sheep to save my soul."
"There's a good deal that's disagreeable about war," William answered dryly. "I, for one, would rather let the South go about their business."
"We can't do that," said Ben, with conviction. "We've got the right on our side, and we're bound to maintain it."
"It all seems perfectly clear to you, apparently."
"Yes. I can't see that the thing's got two sides. But," brightening, "do you know, Bill, it's very lucky that you don't look at it as the rest of us do, for if you did, it would be just like you to go to the war yourself. You'd be the very fellow to go down there and get shot."
"It will certainly be just like a good many poor fellows to doit. Fellows," William added ​gloomily, "that have more to lose than some of us."
"Nobody could have much more to lose than you and I, Bill, with our wives and children."
William did not respond immediately, but then he was not a particularly responsive man. At last he said: "There's one thing you and I wouldn't have to leave behind to keep our wives and children company."
"What's that?"
"Beggary."
Again there was a long pause.
"Well, Bill," said Ben, at last, as he finished his cigar and turned to depart, "I think you've got hold of this thing by the wrong end, but your heart's all right, I'll be bound!"
"Rubbish!" William growled. "Hearts don't count. It's heads we want and they're mighty scarce just now."
But all this was only the prelude. Men talked, and argued, and discussed the war, and knew very little of what they were talking about. War is a grim word, but, after all, what is a word, even the grimmest?
The terrible awakening which swept over the land when the thunder of the first gun boomed across the waters in Charleston Harbor was almost as astounding, almost as appalling, as though the name of war had not been spoken till that day. It was on Saturday, the 13th of April, that the echoes of that gun reached the North.
​William Pratt, driving into town across the long bridge, saw hundreds of flags floating over the city. Their brave colors fluttering on the breeze seemed to speak of cheerful things, and for a moment the weight of anxiety and foreboding was lifted from his heart. But on the outskirts of the city he was undeceived. Newsboys were bawling the bad tidings at the top of their voices, men were standing in knots talking vociferously, and gesticulating in a manner unusual in an American crowd.
Pratt reined in his horse and bought a paper. He glanced at it, mechanically guiding his horse through the crowded streets. The headings were enough.
"War Begun!"
"The South Strikes the First Blow!"
"Fort Moultrie Opens Fire on Fort Sumter at Four O'Clock, Friday Morning."
He let the paper slip to his feet, and took a firm hold of the reins, to steady himself, not the horse.
The air seemed full of flying flags. Their bright colors fluttered through his thoughts in a strange, bewildering way. All the world was talking and gesticulating. He did not want to talk, he did not want to hear what was said. He knew enough. Too much. It was the worst. Nothing could mitigate that. He turned his ​horse's head away from the centre of the town, out toward the open country.
For three days William Pratt bore himself like a man indifferent to the great events that mastered every heart. He lived apparently unmoved by the tremendous emotions that surged about him. His face was set and hard. His eye was dull. His neighbors, when they saw him pass, murmured to one another the fatal word, "Secesh," fancying that they had the key to that stony indifference. And all the while his mind was in a tumult.
It was an inner vision rather than a thought that occupied him. The singular, irresistible power of a symbol had laid hold upon him. It was not the country he thought of, not the cause. It was the flag, the Stars and Stripes, that he had loved unconsciously for forty years, that riveted his mind. He saw them floating over Fort Sumter, brave and proud as they had floated over the city when he drove across the bridge on that Saturday morning. He saw them lowered at the bidding of a hostile gun.
For on Sunday news came of the surrender of the fort. The announcement was made from the pulpit. Strong men were shaken with sobs. Women's faces blanched. A little child in the pew in front of him pulled at his father's hand which hid his father's face, saying: "Don't ee cry, Papa." All day long that childish voice haunted William in meaningless reiteration. Yet he sat with tearless eyes and firm-set lips, seem​ingly shut out alike from the terror and the exaltation of the hour.
When the service was ended, and he stepped out into the sunshine, his wife and children stayed behind while he walked home alone.
On Tuesday William Pratt did a startlingly inconsistent thing. He deliberately enrolled his name among the defenders of that cause about which he had been so stubbornly sceptical.
When he came home from the recruiting office in the afternoon, he found his brother Ben sitting with his wife. It was just at dusk and the gas had not yet been lighted. William came in with a muttered greeting and took his seat in a large arm-chair where he leaned back heavily.
"Well, Ben," said he, "I'm glad to find you here. I suppose you'll be surprised to know that I've enlisted."
"Enlisted!"
"Enlisted!"
Edna's voice was sharp and high, Ben's low with consternation. There was a dead silence before Ben spoke again with a somewhat unsteady accent.
"Why, Bill," he said, "I don't understand. I thought you didn't believe in the cause."
"You always sided with the South!" Edna urged, with feeble remonstrance.
"That was before they fired on the flag," her husband answered, in a tone of voice that she had never heard before.
​Ben could not argue, but he plead, and Edna wept and lamented, and William sat there feeling as solitary in his newly awakened loyalty as he had found himself in the days of his heresy, till presently a slight figure in a bright plaid frock stole to his side, and a soft little hand was slipped within his own. It washis daughter Mary, who had sat by unobserved, and came to offer her mite of sympathy. He clasped the little hand tightly, and Mary sat on the arm of his chair all through the long discussion which followed.
At last Ben left them, and Edna went to dry her tears in her own room, and when they were alone together Mary said, in a very solemn voice: "Father, I wish I were a man so that I could go and fight for my country."
It had grown quite dark now. He put his arm about his little daughter and drew her down upon his knee, and then he said rather huskily: "Praise God that youare not a man, Mary. You might have to die for your country."
"I think that would be better than living," she answered, with the simple, straightforward conviction of a child.
There was a strange, new ache in William Pratt's heart, as he pressed the hot little cheek against his own. The flag no longer filled the whole horizon of his thoughts.
Happily for him, there was too much business to be got through in the short interval before he should join his regiment in camp, to leave much ​time for reflection or discussion. 'T'he final winding up of his affairs had to be in a great measure entrusted to his brother Ben, and it was at this time that Ben first learned that William had not taken advantage of the rise in cotton for his own enrichment. Ben was an honest man, but this was beyond him.
"Quixotic," he growled. "Perfectly quixotic! Bill," he cried in desperation, "you need a guardian."
"Do I?" said William.
They were standing over the safe in his office, and as William looked down upon his brother a faint gleam of amusement came into his grave eyes. He was taller by half a head than Ben, and though the difference in their age was not great, he looked much the elder. With his stern, rugged countenance and strong frame, he presented a marked contrast to his blue-eyed, good-humored junior, whose short figure was getting stout but would never be powerful.
"Do I?" he asked again.
"Yes, Bill! you do! First you throw away your luck and then you do your best to throw away your life. I'm blessed if I can see what right you have to cut into us all in this way, especially for a cause you never stood up for before."
"Queer that I can't make you understand," said William, with a contraction of the brows, as though he were trying to think out some elabo​rate explanation of a very simple problem. "I suppose you can imagine the case of mother, for instance, getting into a difference of opinion with a neighbor, and your admitting that he was as much in the right as she. But if he were to lift his hand against her, I reckon you wouldn't think twice before you knocked him down."
The trouble in Ben's face deepened. The allusion to his mother only made things worse. The old lady had "plenty of grit," but her eyes were so much brighter than usual when he called to see her that morning that he had felt anxious. She was an old woman and ought not to be called upon for the exercise of heroism.
William himself was too preoccupied to be very much alive to other people's feelings. Among all the confused experiences of that time of preparation and departure there was only one moment that stood out clearly in his mind, that dwelt with him in the weeks that followed, when he lay awake under the stars in the home camp, and later when he came into close quarters with the realities of war.
The apologetic embarrassment of his discomfited accusers made very little impression upon him, while even as to his wife herself, he seemed to have forgotten just what she did and said at the last. He could recall hardly anything about his parting with his brothers and sisters. He remembered the grip of the dry and wrinkled hand of age, when he kissed his mother, and that her ​brave old lips trembled slightly as they touched his. But whether she had said the word good-bye or had failed to say it he did not know.
In his breast pocket was a neat little penwiper, the covering worked in red, white, and blue worsteds in the shape ofa flag, and in yellow silk were done "all the stars for all the States," little Mary had said when she gave it to him. "And you must use it, Father, when you write to us, and when you bring it home again it will have come true, and all the States will be in the Union, just as they used to be."
He had taken the child's face between his two large hands, and looked down with infinite wistfulness into the clear young eyes.
"Mary," he had said, "I wish you and I had known each other a little better."
"Never mind, Father," the girlish treble sounded sweet and true as a bell. "When we meet again we shall be great friends."
Then he had kissed her forehead and held her very close, and she had stroked the front of his coat, the Union coat that he was to do his fighting in, until her mother came and claimed her right to weep upon his shoulder.
He thought of his clear-eyed, high-hearted little daughter, as he sat among the men of his company on the eve of the first great disaster of Bull Run and again as he went into action the next day.
The bullet that pierced his heart passed first through the little worsted flag, but it left the field ​of stars unbroken. And the little flag was buried with him in Southern soil, a mute and hidden witness to the better time to come.
When that good time had come, when the humble testimony of those tiny golden stars had been fulfilled, the little Mary had grown to be a tall young woman, rather mature and thoughtful for her years. Many girlish fancies had passed away, many hard realities had come to take their place. But no ungentle years could rob her of her best heritage, her father's memory, nor did she ever lose faith in her parting words to him: "When we meet again we shall be great friends."