In a year or so came the war, and nowhere in the North did patriotic excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper Dearborn. Public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was raised in Octavius and the surrounding towns alone. Alva Turnbull made the most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and sent a thrill through the whole country-side by claiming the privilege of heading the list of volunteers. He was made a captain by general acclaim, and went off with his company in time to get chased from the field of Bull Run. When he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a major, and later on he rose to be lieutenant-colonel. We understood vaguely that he might have climbed vastly higher in promotion but for the fact that he was too moral and conscientious to get on very well with his immediate superior, General Boyce, of Thessaly, who was notoriously a drinking man. It was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his, even as a major. His old parents literally abased themselves at his feet, quite tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. It made it almost too much to have Serena there also, this fair, thin-faced, prim-spoken daughter of the Wadsworths, and actually to call her by her first name. It was haying time, I remember, but the hired men that year did not eat their meals with the family, and there was even a question whether Marcellus and I were socially advanced enough to come to the table, where Serena and her husband were feeding themselves in state with a novel kind of silver implement called a four-tined fork. If Em hadn’t put her foot down, out to the kitchen we should both have gone, I fancy. As it was, we sat decorously at the far end of the table, and asked with great politeness to have things passed to us, which by standing up we could have reached as well as not. It was slow, but it made us feel immensely respectable, almost as if we had been born Wadsworths ourselves. We agreed that Serena was “stuck up,” and Mar-cellus reported Aunt Em as feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited on hand and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition bordering upon the intolerable. He said that that was the sort of thing the English did until George Washington rose and drove them out. But we both felt that Alva was splendid.