Home-bulletins brought the news of the death of my stern old grandmother at the advanced age of eighty-four. She had never given her sanction to the war, disapproving of military operations with the whole might of her rugged nature. On a certain Sunday in June, news was brought by fast express, while the people were in church, that the war-vessel _Pawnee_ was on its way up the river to bombard the town. Owing to the old lady’s deafness, she did not fully comprehend why the services were closed summarily, and the streets were too full of people hurrying to and fro, for my father to explain the state of affairs on the way home. On the front steps they met my brother Horace in the uniform of the Richmond Howitzers, to which he belonged. They had been ordered summarily to repair to the point from which the expected attack was to be repelled. A few hasty sentences put her into possession of leading facts; the boy kissed her; shook hands with his father, and ran down the street. The old Massachusetts dame, whose father and husband had fought in the Revolutionary War, stood still and looked after him until he was out of sight. He was her favorite of the boys—we fancied because he resembled the Edwin she had wished to adopt, and who died in her arms. The lad she followed with puzzled and griefful eyes was of a goodly presence, and never goodlier than in his uniform. Did she bethink herself of the probability that she might never see him again? What she thought, and what she felt, will never be known. When my father addressed her, she gazed at him with uncomprehending eyes, turned, and walked feebly up the stairs. “I am afraid mother is not well,” said my father to my mother, after they had talked a few minutes of the alarm and Horace’s departure. “She looked shaken by the boy’s going. Will you go up and look after her?” She had undressed and gone to bed. She had taken her seat in church that morning, a fine-looking dame of the old school; erect and strong; alert of wits and firm of purpose. My mother looked into the face of a shrunken, dull-eyed crone, who asked, in quavering accents, “Who she was, and what was her business?” Then she began to moan and beg to be taken “home.” That was her cry, whenever she spoke at all, all summer long. But once did she quit her bed. That was when the nurse left her, as they supposed, sleeping, and discovered her half an hour later, fumbling at the lock of the front door, and in her nightgown. She “wanted to go home! she would go home!” She went on September 5th, while we, hundreds of miles away, were watching over our sick boy. “The war killed off most of our old people,” said an ex-Confederate officer once to me. “Almost as many died of sheer brokenheartedness, as on the battle-field! _That’s_ an account somebody has got to settle some day, if there is any justice in heaven.”