“DEAR ALLAN:—It’s Tom’s turn to write, but he says I do it because his hand’s took to shaking so. The doctor says it’s just eagerness—he wants to know all the time and at the right identical minute what’s happening. And even the newspapers don’t know that, though Lord knows they think they do! But it’s just as bad to be sick with eagerness as to be sick with anything else. It’s sickness just the same as if it was typhoid or pleurisy. Yes, Allan, I’m anxious enough about Tom,—though, of course, I didn’t read that out to him. He’s sitting in the sunshine holding the toll-box, and there ain’t anything in it—and there never will be until you all stop this fool war. The doctor says—Yes, Tom!... Allan, you just straighten this letter out in your own head.” Oh, it straightened out well enough in Allan’s head! He let the hand that held it drop upon the leaves, and he looked up the knife-blade ravine to where the green rim of the mountain touched the blue. He saw Thunder Run Mountain, and he heard, over the murmur of surrounding trees, the voice of Thunder Run. He saw with the inner eye the toll-house, the roses and the pansies and the bees. It was not going well with the toll-house—he knew that. Tom failing, and no toll taken, the county probably paying nothing.... Where was the money with which it could pay? Sairy fighting hard—he saw her slight, bent old figure—fighting hard now with this end, now with that, to make them meet. He knew they would never meet now, not while this war lasted. It was one of the bitter byproducts—that never meeting. There was nothing to send—he himself had had no pay this long while. Pay, in the Southern armies, was a vanishing quantity. The wood blurred before Allan’s eyes. He sighed and took up the letter again. “The school-house is most fallen down. They told me so, and I went up the Run one evening and looked at it. It’s so. It looked like a yearning ghost. Christianna tried to teach the children awhile this spring, but Christianna never was no bookworm. An’ then she had to do the spring ploughing, for Mrs. Maydew went down into the Valley to nurse the smallpox soldiers. Mrs. Cleave went, too, from Three Oaks. I haven’t got much of a garden this year, but the potatoes and sparrowgrass look fine. The wrens have built again in the porch. They’re company for Tom, now that there’s so little other company. He’s named the one Adam and the other Eve—Lord knows they’re wiser than some Adams and Eves I know!—Tom’s calling!— “It wasn’t anything. He thought it was a wagon coming up the road. If this war don’t stop soon, some of us won’t be here to see it stop. And now he says if he just had a little something sweet to eat—and there ain’t no sugar nor nothing in the house!