Everything about the usually cheerful farm-house was shrouded in palpable gloom. The papers of the day before, with their ghastly lists of the dead and wounded, had contained Si's and Shorty's names, besides those of other boys of the neighborhood, in terrific, unmistakable plainness. There were few homes into which mourning had not come. The window curtains were drawn down, the front doors closed, no one appeared on the front porch, and it seemed that even the dogs and the fowls were op pressed with the general sadness, and forebore their usual cheerful utterances. Attired in sober black, with eyes red from weeping, and with camphor bottle near, Mr. Klegg sat in Si's room, and between her fits of uncontrollable weeping turned over, one after another, the reminders of her son. There were his bed, his clothes, which she had herself fashioned in loving toil for him; the well-thumbed school-books which had cost him so many anxious hours, his gun and fishing rod. All these were now sacred to her. Elsewhere in the house his teary-eyed sisters went softly and silently about their daily work. The father had sought distraction in active work, and was in the cornfield, long corn-knife in hand, shocking up the tall stalks with a desperate energy to bring forgetfulness. Abraham Lincoln burst into the kitchen, and taking the dispatch from his hat said: "Hyah am a papeh or sumfin dat de agent down at de station done tole me to bring hyah jest as quick as I done could. He said hit done come ober a wire or a telugraph, or sumfin ob dat ere sort, and you must hab hit right-a-way." "O, my; it's a telegraph dispatch," screamed Maria with that sickening apprehension that all women have of telegrams. "It's awful. I can't tech it. Take it Sophy." "How can I," groaned poor Sophia, with a fresh outburst of tears. "But I suppose I must." The mother heard the scream and the words, and hurried into the room. "It's a telegraph dispatch, mother," said both the girls as they saw her. "Merciful Father," ejaculated Mrs. Klegg, sinking into a chair in so nearly a faint that Maria ran into the next room for the camphor-bottle, while Sophy rushed outside and blew the horn for the Deacon. Presently he entered, his sleeves rolled to the elbow over his brawny arms, and his shirt and pantaloons covered with the spanish-needles and burrs which would grow, even in so well-tilled fields as Deacon Klegg's. "What's the matter, mother? What's the matter, girls?" he asked anxiously. Mrs. Klegg could only look at him in speechless misery. "We've got a telegraph dispatch," finally answered Maria, bursting in a torrent of tears, into which Sophia joined sympathetically, "and we know it's about poor Si." "Yes, it must be about poor Si; nobody else but him," added Sophia with a wail. The father's face grew more sorrowful than be fore. "What does it say?" he nerved himself to ask, after a moment's pause.