The widow uttered no sound when she knew he was dead, and it was her hand which drew the covering decently about him, and then picked up from the floor a loose _feather_, which had dropped from the worn pillow. Susan must speak to their next-door neighbors, she said, and ask them to care for the body. Then, when the men came in, she remembered an open window in the back chamber where the rain must be driving in, and stole up there on the pretence of shutting it; but she did not return till the men were gone, and Isaac was lying on the calico-covered lounge with a look of perfect peace upon his face, and the damp night air blowing softly across his light hair. Kneeling at his side, and laying her hard cheek against the icy face of her last-born, the mother gave vent to her grief in her own peculiar way. There were no tears, or sobs; but loving, tender, cooing words whispered over the boy, as if he had been a living baby, instead of a soldier dead. And yet the fact that it was a soldier, lying there before her, was never lost sight of, and the bitter part of the woman’s nature was stirred to its very depths as she remembered what had brought her boy to this. It was the _war_. And fierce were the mental denunciations against those who had stirred up the strife, while with the bitterness came pitying thoughts of the poor boys who died in the lonely hospitals, or on the battle-fields; and with her cheek still resting against the pale, clammy one, and her fingers threading the light hair, the widow vowed that all she was, and all she had, should henceforth be given to the war. She would work for the soldiers, give to the soldiers, deny herself food and raiment for the soldiers; aye, even _die_ for them, if need be; and whispering the vow into her dead boy’s ear, she left him there alone, just as the early summer dawn was breaking. And when, next morning, her friends came in to see her, they found her sitting by the body, and working upon the shirt she had a few days before taken from the Aid Society to make for some poor wretch. She should not wear mourning, she said. She had other uses for her money; and so the leghorn of many years’ date, with the old faded green veil, followed Isaac Simms to the grave, and the widow’s face was still and stony as if cut from solid marble. They made him a great funeral, too, though not so great as George Graham’s had been; for Isaac was not the second, nor the third, nor the fourth soldier buried in Rockland’s churchyard. But he was _Isaac Simms_,—“Little Ike,”—“Stub,”—whom everybody liked; and so the firemen came out to do him honor, and the Rockland Guards, and the company of young lads who were beginning to drill, and the boys from the Academy, and Rose Mather was chief directress, and her carriage carried the widow, and Susan, and Annie, and herself up to the newly-made grave, where they left the boy who once had sawed wood for the little lady now paying him such honor.