Emmeline thought of the Schmidt baby. He was heavy, and could not be dragged, cart and all, through crowds; he would be an annoying encumbrance to a girl who liked to be in the forefront of everything. It was certainly not true that the rebels were coming; but something was coming, and Emmeline wished to be at hand to see. If she hurried up this alley and down that back street, she could reach her own yard and then the front street. She could leave the Schmidt baby, fast asleep by now, on the side porch of her house, or could thrust him, cart and all, into the kitchen. Planning as she ran, Emmeline hurried down the alley and the back street, and at last reached her own garden. Leaving the baby in the kitchen, she came through the side yard to the gate. There she halted, with quaking knees. It was not the rebels that had come, but some strange, tanned, half-clad creatures; they marched in good order, and looked steadily from their hollow eyes at astonished Gettysburg, which crowded, half fearful, at corners, and hung, curious, from windows. Many of the soldiers were barefooted; others wore shoes from which the soles had fallen; some had tied the soles to their shoes with strips of soiled and blackened rags. Emmeline stared with open mouth. Half in fun and half in earnest, the strangers began to jeer at their amazed and paralyzed audience:-- "We're not a parade, Yankees!" "We've come to eat you up!" One of them caught sight of Emmeline, with her ruffled dress, staring eyes, and open mouth. "Hello, sissy!" he called. "Look out that when you close your mouth you don't bite your tongue off!" Emmeline did not realize the full measure of the insult, for as he spoke, she had caught sight of a flag that hitherto she had beheld only in pictures--a flag that she scorned and despised. She mounted at once to a higher bar on her mother's gate. "'Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,'" sang Emmeline. "'What so--'" Suddenly she felt some one seize her. She struggled, and cried, "Let me go! Let me go, I tell you!" Then she realized that the hand on her shoulder was a familiar one. "Emmeline," commanded her mother, "be still!" "He insulted me! He's a rebel!" "Emmeline," commanded Mrs. Willing again, "be still!" Then from her mother's lips came an incredible order: "Go and fill the water pail, and bring it here with a dipper." "Mother!" gasped Emmeline. "Are we going to give them water?" "Go, Emmeline!" "They are the enemies of my country!" "Go!" said Emmeline's mother. When Mrs. Willing spoke in that tone, even Henry, who was a man, moved swiftly. Emmeline looked up into her mother's face, but her mother was not looking down at her. Her eyes were turned toward the street, toward that apparently unending line of weariness and raggedness and burning eyes. She saw only the men's hunger, their thirst, their need.