“Antietam took the flower of our youth,” Cousin Roxy would say, with old tender memories softening the look in her gray eyes as she gazed out over the old square plots. “The boys didn’t know what they were facing. My mother was left a young widow then. Land alive, do you suppose there’d ever be war if women went out to fight each other? I can’t imagine any fun or excitement in shooting down my sisters, but men folks are different. Give them a cause and they’ll leave plough, home, and harrow for a good fight with one another. And when Decoration Day comes around, I always want to hang my wreaths around the necks of the old fellows who are still with us, Ezry, and Philly Weaver, and old Mr. Peckham and the rest. And that reminds me,” here her eyes twinkled. The girls always knew a story was coming when they looked that way, brimful of mirth. “I just met Philly Weaver hobbling along the road after some stray cows, ninety-two years young, and scolding like forty because, as he said, ‘That boy, Ezry Hicks, who only carried a drum through the war, has dared ask for an increase in pension.’ Ezry must be seventy-four if he’s a day, but he’s still a giddy boy drummer to Philly.” Jean helped plan out the programme. It seemed like old times back at the Cove where the girls were always getting up some kind of entertainment for the church or their own club. Billy Peckham, who was a big boy over at Gayhead school this year, would deliver the Gettysburg speech, and the Judge could be relied on to give a good one too. Then Jean hit on a plan. Shad was lanky and tall, awkward and overgrown as ever Abe Lincoln had been. Watching him out of the dining-room window as he split wood, she exclaimed suddenly, “Why couldn’t we have a series of tableaux on his early life, Cousin Roxy. Just look out there at Shad. He’s the image of some of the early pictures, and he never gets his hair cut before spring, he says, just like the horses. Let’s try him.” Once they had started, it seemed easy. The first scene could be the cabin in the clearing. Jean would be Nancy Lincoln, the young mother, seated by the fireplace, teaching her boy his letters from the book at her knee. “Dug Moffat will be right for that,” said Jean happily. “He’s about six. Then we must show the boy Lincoln at school. Out in Illinois, that was, wasn’t it, Cousin Roxy, where he borrowed some books from the teacher, and the rain soaked the covers, so he split his first wood to earn them.” Cousin Roxy promised to hunt up all the necessary historical data in the Judge’s library at home, and they went after it in earnest. Freddie Herrick, the groceryman’s boy over at the Center, was chosen for Abe at this stage, and Kit coaxed Mr. Ricketts, the mailcarrier, to be the teacher.