Another memory that has become a part of my being grows out of the great Civil War. I was probably four or five years old, and was playing under the big maple-trees in our old front yard. The scene all comes back to me as I write. I have a stick or hoop, or perhaps both, in my little hand. No one else is anywhere about. I hear a drum and fife coming over the hill, and I run to the fence and look down the gravelly road. A two-horse wagon loaded with men and boys, whose names and perhaps faces I seem to know, drives past me as I peer through the palings of the fence. They are dressed in uniform, and are proud and gay. In the centre of the wagon is one boy standing up; I see his face plainly, and catch its boyish smile. They drive past the house to the railroad station, on their way to the Southern battle-fields. I must have been told a great deal about these men and about the war, for my people were abolitionists, who looked upon the rebels as some sort of monsters, and had no thought that there could be any side but ours. However, I now remember nothing at all of what was said to me, but I hear the martial music, I see the horses and wagons and men, and clear and distinct from all the rest is this one boy’s face that I knew so well. Even more distinctly do I remember a day some months later. I must then have begun going to the district school, for I remember that there was no school that day. I recall a great throng of people, and among them all the boys and girls from school, and we are gathered inside the burying-ground where they are carrying the young soldier who rode past our house a few months before. I cannot remember what was said at the funeral, but this is the first impression that I can recall of the grim spectre Death. What it meant to my childish mind I cannot now conceive. I remember only the hushed awe and the deep dread that fell upon us all when we realized that they were putting this boy into the ground and that we should never see his face again. Whatever the feeling, I fancy that time and years have not changed or modified it, or made it any easier to reconcile or understand. But with the memory of the funeral there lingers an impression that we all thought this young man a glorious, brave, and noble boy, and that his widowed mother and brothers and sisters ought to have felt happy and proud that he was buried in the ground. I remembered the mother for many years, and how she always mourned her son; but it was a long, long time before I came to understand that the fact that the boy was killed upon the field of battle really did not make the sorrow any less for the family left behind. And it was still longer before I came to realize that it is no more noble or honorable to die fighting on the field of battle than in any other way. CHAPTER III MY HOME