I think that even then my hearing was a little defective. I heard my father come in below, and mother’s clear voice was certainly intended for our hearing. “Now, Joseph, you go right up and whip those boys! They would not mind me, and _you must do it_.” All through my life I have somehow managed to hear the unpleasant remarks or thorns of life. We deaf usually miss the bouquets. Poor father! The Civil War was raging, and he had volunteered. My young people seem to think that the Civil War was a mere skirmish beside the great World War just ended. Perhaps so, if we count only money and men, yet our part in this recent conflict was but a plaything in intense living, in sentiment, and breaking up of family life, as compared with the war of the sixties. Father was to leave home for the front in less than a week. He was captain of the local company, and should probably have been stronger in family discipline. But his heart was tender. He did not want to whip his boys, and he protested, as many a man has done. I could not hear what he said, but I knew from the expression on my brother’s face that he was protesting. Tonight, after these long and toilsome years have boiled out much of ambition and the desire to know the great things of life, I wish most keenly that I could have heard what my father said. But mother insisted, as good women do, and finally we heard the big man slowly mounting the stairs. I can see him now as he stood framed in the doorway with the bright splinter of sunshine bathing him in light; a tall man with a strong, kindly face and a thick black beard. It is the only real memory I have of my father, for he did not come back from the war alive. Long, long years after, I sat at a great banquet next to a famous Senator, who had seen much of life. I told him that I have only this memory of my father, but that I had finally found a man who had served in the same regiment with him, slept in the same tent, who had known him intimately as a man. “Now,” I asked, “shall I hunt up that man and have him tell me in his own way just what kind of a man my father was?” Quickly the answer came from this hardened old diplomat: “Keep away from him! Let him alone! Never go near him! Burn his letters without reading them. You now have an ideal of your father. This man knows him as just a plain, common man, probably with most of the faults of humanity. Let him alone! If at your age God has permitted you to retain an ideal of any human being, keep it pure. Take no chances of having it blackened!”