One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir. You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those strange streaks of fate--which he is very careful to explain to his audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines--he had been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to the door of his own father’s house. What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy beard since he left home. As to his fate--if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight comes--well, he knows his own mother. His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope. * * * * * Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of all--except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl--he had brought everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South. Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.” And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder, insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family. The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart--one can scarcely speak of the matter. And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one--a pure and innocent southern girl of rare beauty--a pearl of womanhood in fact--rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the Southland--his younger sister--the only woman child of the family.