The child's eyes filled with tears, but he did not cry. His emotion was spent. The two sat together for a time, and the little boy said, "Why didn't you go, Mr. Culpepper?" And the man replied: "Me? Oh--why--Oh, yes, I got a little scratch here in my leg, and they won't let me out of here. There's Watts over there in the next cot; he got a little scratch too--didn't you, Watts?" Watts and the boy smiled at each other, but John did not see Bob again for years. Miss Hendricks came and took him to their father's people in Ohio. One day some one came in the hospital where John and Watts and Martin Culpepper were lying, and began to call out mail for the men, and the third name the corporal called was "Captain Martin Culpepper"; and when they brought him a long official envelope with General Fremont's name on it, Martin Culpepper held it in his hands, looked at the inscription, read the word "captain" again and again, and could not speak for choked joy. And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not see the "large white plumes" of chivalry, but the men in the beds cheered as they heard the words the corporal read. With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white, and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to Sycamore Ridge on pilgrimages to see the author of the song, men do not smile in wonder; they show the visitors his shop, and point out the bowed little man bending over his bench, stretching his arms out as he sews, and they point him out with pride. Not even John Barclay with all his millions, or Bob Hendricks, who once refused a place in the President's cabinet, are more esteemed in Sycamore Ridge than the little harness maker who set the world to singing.