Hayward Graham was twenty-three years old. He had half finished his senior year at Harvard—with credit, it must be said—when the imminence of war drove all desire for study from his mind. He wrote to Harry Lodge a former college chum who had graduated in the class ahead of him and gone to Ohio to make a name for himself—fortune he had already—and asked that his name be proposed for membership in Lodge’s company of the 71st, as a regiment most likely to get in the scrimmage when it came. Lodge had done this and had written to Graham that doubtless he would be received on the next meeting night as war was at that time a certainty. Whereupon Graham had bundled up his traps and come without delay. Graham’s mother also had travelled to Ohio, for the double purpose of telling her soldier good-bye and making a passing, and what promised to be a last visit to some, of her old Oberlin friends, drawing for expenses upon limited funds she had religiously hoarded and applied to her son’s tuition. Her husband had always impressed upon her, and in his last moment enjoined, that the boy should be educated; and she had obeyed his wishes to the limit of her power and as a command from heaven. She had husbanded her small patrimony, recovered after a costly suit at law, slow-dragging through the New Hampshire courts, and had allowed it to accumulate while her son was in the graded schools against the time when it would be needed to send him to college. When that time had come it required no little faith to see how the small bank account would be sufficient to meet the expenses of four years at Harvard. She would better have sent the boy to a less expensive school, but no: John Graham had gone to Harvard, and nothing less than Harvard for his son would satisfy her idea of loyalty to his father’s memory and admonitions. So to Harvard she sent him, while she planned and worked to stretch and patch out the limited purse; and—miracle of financiering—she had fetched him to the half of his last year, and could have carried him to his graduation and still had enough dollars left to attend that momentous ceremony in a new frock.