For a time no one seemed inclined to volunteer her services, and Widow Simms’s shears clicked spitefully loud as they cut through the cotton flannel. At last, however, Mrs. Baker, who had more than once officiated as washerwoman at the Mather mansion, came forward and arranged some work for Rose, who, untying the strings of her pink hat, and adjusting her tiny gold thimble, labored on until she had succeeded in sewing up and joining together a long leg with one some inches shorter, which had happened to be lying near. Loud was the shout which a discovery of this mistake called forth, nor was it at all abated when Rose demurely asked if it would not answer for some soldier who should chance to have a limb shot off just below the knee. “The little simpleton!” muttered the widow, while Mrs. Baker pointed out to the discomfited lady that one division of the drawers was right side out and the other wrong! There was no alternative save to rip the entire thing, and with glowing cheeks, Rose began the task of undoing what she had done, incidentally letting out, as she worked, that Will might have known better than to send her there,—she shouldn’t have come at all if he had not insisted, telling her people would call her a secessionist unless she did something to benefit the soldiers. She didn’t care what they called her; she knew she was a democrat, or used to be before she was married; but now that Will was a republican, she hardly knew what she was; any way, she was not a secessionist, and she wasn’t particularly interested in the war either; why should she be?—Will was not going, nor Brother Tom, nor any of her friends. “But somebody’s friends are going,—somebody’s Will, somebody’s Tom; as dear to them as yours are to you,” came in a rebuking tone from a straight-forward, outspoken woman, who knew from sad experience that “somebody’s Tom was going.” “Yes, I know,” said Rose, a shadow for an instant crossing her bright face, “and it’s dreadful, too. Will says everything will be so much higher, and it will be so dull at Saratoga and Newport next summer, without the Southern people. One might as well stay at home. The war might have been avoided, too, by a little mutual forbearance from both parties, until matters could be amicably adjusted, for Brother Tom said so in his letter last night, and a heap more which I can’t remember.” Here Rose paused quite exhausted, with the effort she had made to repeat the opinion of Brother Tom. She had read all his last letter, fully indorsing as much of it as she understood, and after a little she went on: “Wasn’t it horrid, though, their firing into the Massachusetts boys?—and they were from right ’round Boston, too. Tom saw them when they started. They were fine looking men, he says, and Will thinks I ought to be proud that I’m a Bay State girl, and so I am, but it isn’t as if my friends had gone. Tom is a democrat, I know, but it’s quite another kind that join the army.”