For this is the first sorrow in the heart of a man, that he should have known boyhood and never been able to appreciate its heritage until the clocks of time are all run down and the chambers of his heart are peopled with ghosts! IV In February of the year following, the _Maine_ was mined in Havana harbor. I remember my father coming home through a storm of raw, wet sleet and leaving his horse unharnessed while he entered the kitchen to read the headlines of the Boston paper to my mother. In great block letters on the front page was the grim word—“WAR!” Neighbors came in after supper. Opinion had it that fighting would follow at once. They conversed as though death were in the house. While they talked, I tried to listen. I fell asleep under the sofa, and when I awoke I was in bed with mother. I could not understand why she hugged me to her heart so fiercely and sobbed in the winter darkness. Spring came quickly after that. It seems only yesterday that Nat and I attended the “flag-raisings” and public gatherings down on the village Common, with the boys in blue getting ready for Chickamauga. I can hear again the martial band music; I can see the flash of the drillmaster’s sword and hear the thumps of the rifle butts in the open door of the town engine house where “Captain” Jack Halloway was drilling the Foxboro boys. I watched them with throttled heart and dry, hot throat. My father was among them! Never shall I forget that last breakfast at home, how smart he looked in his stiff blue uniform and how heavy his rifle felt when I tried to lift it and point it at a target. I remember too that he and mother avoided each other’s eyes during that breakfast. Mother did not go to the station. She could not trust herself. I tried to see dad as the train pulled out but the crowd engulfed me. All my life since he has been but a picture in a plush album on the center table in mother’s parlor—an erect little man with a fierce mustache, his slouch hat with crossed-muskets showing plainly. Nathan’s father did not go to war. He said war “stood condemned by Religion.” He quit cobbling to move down to the Center and open a store. Micah Baker’s eldest son Sela came home on a furlough the following autumn. I remember his rumpled soldiering clothes, the rakish angle of his hat, how he stood with his back to the kitchen range, warming himself. He had been ill with fever and wore an overcoat, roughly tied at the neck with a piece of rope. My mother’s face was ashen as she waited for him to speak. As he was about to leave, he remarked quietly: “Herb wanted I should tell you his last thoughts was of you and the boy. And ... he didn’t suffer no more’n could be expected. He said especially to tell the boy his dad’s sorry he can’t be on hand to help him as he grows to manhood.”