country is my country, and that this home among the Pennsylvania hills was never quite so dear to me before as it is to-day. I thank you. I am grateful to you all. Your welcome has touched me so deeply--so deeply”--and then his voice went utterly to pieces, and with tears of joy streaming down his face, he left the stand. The meeting did not last long after that. There were more numbers on the programme indeed. But when Rhett Bannister had finished, so many were talking, so many were cheering, so many were crying, that the chairman simply let the people have their own way and finish as they would. It was a happy supper-party at the Bannister home that night; so like the suppers in the summer days of old, in the years before the war. After it was over, Bob went down by the path across the meadow, as he used to go, to see Seth Mills. The old man had failed much of late. Age was resting heavily upon him, and he was too feeble to go far from home. And in the beautiful June twilight Rhett Bannister sat upon his porch and looked out upon the old familiar scene: the fields, the trees, the road, the clear and wonderful expanse of sky. But when his eyes wandered, for a moment, to the shop and the windmill tower crowned by the motionless blades of the big wheel, he turned them away. There were things which, on this night of nights, he did not care to bring back to memory. And, as he sat there, holding in his own the hand of the happiest, proudest woman that the stars looked down upon that summer night in all the old Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, there came the well-remembered click of the front-gate latch, and, out of the darkness, hobbling slowly up the walk, came the bent figure of Seth Mills. Bannister leaped from the porch and hurried down the path to meet him. The old man stopped and looked him over in well-feigned dismay. “Rhett Bannister,” he exclaimed, “you blamed ol’ copperhead! you skallywag deserter! you deep-dyed villyan! what ’a you wearin’ them blue soldier clothes fur?” Then, as Bannister hesitated, in doubt as to how he should take this outburst, his visitor broke into a hearty laugh. “Well, Rhett,” he said, “I forgive you. I forgive you. Where’s your hand? Where’s your two hands? I knowed what you’d do when the boy went. I told him so. God bless you, but I’m proud of you! I’m proud o’ both of you! Bob’s been down; splendid boy; said I mustn’t come up here; too fur to walk. I told him to mind his own business; that I was comin’ up to shake hands with Rhett Bannister ef it took a leg; ef it took both legs, by cracky!” Bannister helped the old man up the steps, and made him comfortable in a big porch-chair, and told him a hundred things he wanted to know, and at last he told him about Abraham Lincoln. “You know I saw the President?” “I heard all about it, Rhett. You’ve been blessed above your fellow men.” “But you didn’t know that he spoke to me of you?” “Of me? Seth Mills?”