By another way, down the hill toward the railway-station, rattled the wheels of an artillery company; also a little holiday troop, with holiday guns shining brightly. The men sat in their places with folded arms; the crowd, seeing them, knew them all. They were only Miller, and Sieberling, and Wagner, and others as familiar; six months ago--a month ago--they would have laughed inexhaustibly at the idea of calling Tom Miller a hero, or elevating Fritz Wagner to any other pedestal than the top of a beer barrel. But now, as they saw them, they gave a mighty cheer, which rang through the air splendidly, and raised a hue of pride upon the faces of the artillerymen, and perhaps the first feeling in some of their hearts higher than the determination not to "back out," which had been until then their actuating motive. The two shining little guns rattled down the hill; the infantry company marched down behind them. The line of cars, with locomotive attached, was in waiting, and, breaking ranks, helter-skelter, in any way and every way, hindered by hand-shaking, by all sorts of incongruous parting gifts thrust upon them at the last moment by people they never saw before, blessed by excited, tearful women, made heart-sick themselves by the sight of the grief of their mothers and wives, the soldiers took their places in the cars, and the train moved out from the station, followed by a long cheer, taken up and repeated again and again, until nothing but a dark speck on the straight track remained for the shouters to look at, when they stopped suddenly, hoarse and tired, and went silently homeward, pondering upon this new thing which had come into their lives. The petty cares of the day were forgotten. "War is hideous; but it banishes littleness from daily life." Anne, brought up as she had been in a remote little community, isolated and half foreign, was in a measure ignorant of the causes and questions of the great struggle which began in America in April, 1861. Not hers the prayerful ardor of the New England girl who that day willingly gave her lover, saw him brought home later dead, buried him, and lived on, because she believed that he had died to free his brother man, as Christ had died for her. Not hers the proud loyalty of the Southern girl to her blood and to her State, when that day she bade her lover go forth and sweep their fanatical assailants back, as the old Cavaliers, from whom they were descended, swept back the crop-eared Puritans into the sea.