Captain Macklin: His MemoirsDavis, Richard Harding
General
Captain Macklin: His Memoirs
Davis, Richard Harding
Adventure stories; Central America -- Fiction; Soldiers -- Fiction; United States Military Academy -- Fiction; War stories
displeasure toward the entire battalion, I began picking quarrels with
anyone who made pretensions of being a fighter, and who chanced to be
bigger than myself.
Sometimes I got badly beaten, and sometimes I thrashed the other man,
but whichever way it went, those battles in the soft twilight evenings
behind the grass-grown ramparts of the old fort, in the shadow of
the Kosciusko Monument, will always be the brightest and pleasantest
memories of my life at this place.
My grandfather had one other daughter besides my mother, my Aunt Mary,
who had married a Harvard professor, Dr. Endicott, and who had lived in
Cambridge ever since they married.
In my second year here, Dr. Endicott died and my grandfather at once
went to Cambridge to bring Aunt Mary and her daughter Beatrice back
with him, installing them in our little home, which thereafter was to
be theirs as well. He wrote me saying he knew I would not disapprove of
this invasion of my place by my young cousin and assured me that no one,
girl or boy, could ever take the place in his heart that I had held. As
a matter of fact I was secretly pleased to hear of this addition to our
little household. I knew that as soon as I was graduated I would be sent
to some army post in the West, and that the occasional visit I was now
able to pay to Dobbs Ferry would be discontinued. I hated to think that
in his old age my grandfather would be quite alone. On the other hand,
when, after the arrival of my cousin, I received his first letter
and found it filled with enthusiastic descriptions of her, and of how
anxious she was to make him happy, I felt a little thrill of jealousy.
It gave me some sharp pangs of remorse, and I asked myself searchingly
if I had always done my utmost to please my grandfather and to give him
pride and pleasure in me. I determined for the future I would think only
of how to make him happy.
A few weeks later I was able to obtain a few hours’ leave, and I wasted
no time in running down from the Point to make the acquaintance of my
cousin, and to see how the home looked under the new regime. I found it
changed, and, except that I felt then and afterward that I was a guest,
it was changed for the better.
I found that my grandfather was much more comfortable in every way. The
newcomers were both eager and loving, although no one could help but
love my grandfather, and they invented wants he had never felt before,
and satisfied them, while at the same time they did not interfere with
the life he had formerly led. Aunt Mary is an unselfish soul, and most
content when she is by herself engaged in the affairs of the house and
in doing something for those who live in it. Besides her unselfishness,
which is to me the highest as it is the rarest of virtues, hers is a
sweet and noble character, and she is one of the gentlest souls that I
have ever known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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