Though John Barclay was at the meeting, he remembered only his mother's prayer, but in his heart there was always a picture of a little boy trying to walk home with a little girl, and when he came up with her she darted ahead or dropped back. At the Culpepper gate she stood waiting fully a minute for him to catch her, and when he came up to her, she laughed, "Huh, Mr. Smarty, you didn't, did you?" and ran up the walk, scooted into the house, and slammed the door. But he understood and went leaping down the hill toward home with happiness tingling in his very finger-tips. He seemed to be flying rather than walking, and his toes touched the dirt path so lightly that he rounded the corner and ran plump into Miss Lucy and Philemon Ward standing at the gate. And what he saw surprised him so that he let out a great "haw-haw-haw" and ran, trying to escape his shame and fear at his behaviour. But the next morning Miss Lucy smiled so sweetly at him as he came into the schoolroom, that he knew he was forgiven, and that thrill was lost by the thump of joy that startled his heart when he saw a bunch of dog-tooth violets in his ink bottle, and in his geography found a candy heart with a motto on it so fervent that he did not eat it for three long abstemious days of sheer devotion, in which there were eyes and eyes and eyes from the little girl in the scarlet gown. It is strange that the boy did not remember how Sycamore Ridge took the call to arms for the war between the states. All he remembered of the great event in our history as it touched the town was that one day he heard there was going to be a war. And then everything seemed to change. A dread came over the people. It fell upon the school, where every child had a father who was going away. And it was because Madison Hendricks, the first man to leave for the war, was father of Bob and Elmer Hendricks that John's first associations of the great Civil War go back to the big black-bearded man. For Madison Hendricks, who was a graduate of West Point, and a veteran of the Mexican War, was called to Washington in May, and his boys acquired a prestige that was not accorded to them by the mere fact that their father was president of the town company, and was accounted the first citizen of the town. Madison Hendricks, who owned the land on which the town was built, Madison Hendricks, scholar and gentleman, veteran of the Mexican War, first mayor of Sycamore Ridge upon its incorporation,--his sons had no standing. But Madison Hendricks, formally summoned to go to Washington to put down the rebellion, and leaving on the stage with appropriate ceremonies, --there was a man who could bequeath to his posterity in the boy world something of his consequence.